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Diane Arbus was born, to a wealthy Jewish family, in 1923. Diane (pronounced Dee-Ann ) was a privileged child, raised with her two siblings in large apartments on Central Park West and Park Avenue. She was luminous, with large green eyes, a delicate, exotic face and a slim body. All kinds of people were captivated by her, and she was captivated by all kinds of people.
At the age of 13, she met Allan Arbus, an employee in the advertising department of her parents' store, and they married, with her parents' grudging assent, after she turned 18. After the war, during which Allan studied photography in the New Jersey Signal Corps, the couple supported themselves, and daughters Doon and Yolanda, as fashion photographers (the family money, somehow, never materialized for Arbus as an adult).
Though the work was divided along traditional gender roles, with Allan at the camera and Diane as the stylist/art director, they had a supportive relationship. Allan gave Diane her first camera, and they took equal credit on their published photos. In 1956, a year after a photo of theirs was included in curator Edward Steichen's massive Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Allan supported her decision to leave the fashion business to him to pursue her own interests.
The professional separation was followed, in 1959, by a marital separation. They remained close friends, however, and his laboratory assistants developed her film until, in 1969, he re-married and moved to California to become an actor (he played psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Freedman on M.A.S.H. ).
As important to her evolution was a class she took with Lisette Model, a European émigree and photographer who encouraged Arbus, on the one hand, to push further into her thematic interest in unorthodoxy, and, on the other hand, to master the conventional technical aspects of photography.
By the early '60s, her commercial portraits, for magazines such as Esquire and...