Diane Arbus

signed and inscribed with the Arbus Estate authentication number by the photographer's daughter, Doon Arbus, in ink and stamped on the reverse, framed, Cheim & Read, New York, and Karsten Greve Galerie, Cologne and Paris, labels on the reverse, 1965 

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 1972), unpaginated

Diane Arbus and Thomas W. Southall, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (Aperture, 1984), p. 68

Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York, 2003), p. 295

Gilles Mora, The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies (New York, 2007), p. 74

This lifetime print is on double-weight paper with a glossy surface. Aside from minor rippling at the margin edges, this print is in essentially excellent condition. There is a small sharp crease that breaks the emulsion along the lower margin edge. The reverse of the print is inscribed in ink with the Arbus Estate authentication number '4090-12-9U-1620.' The Estate of Diane Arbus copyright stamp is dated 1972.
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This photograph was taken at Sunnyrest, a nudist camp in central Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1965.  Nudist communities had been of interest to Arbus from her early days as a photographer, as they appealed to her fascination for subcultures.  Arbus’s famed collaboration with her subjects was, at Sunnyrest, physical as well as sociological: Arbus had to undress in order to enter the camp.  She rose to the occasion, recollecting that ‘you feel silly for ten minutes and then it’s okay’ (Bosworth, p. 195).

Arbus had hoped to turn her series of images and experiences at nudist camps into a book, but releases from the sitters never materialized.  For Esquire magazine, she proposed an article entitled Notes on the Nudist Camp, whose text is reproduced in the volume, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work.  The beginning of the article encapsulated Arbus’s experience in the odd communities of the naked: ‘It’s like walking into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it is’ (Magazine Work, p. 68).  Although the article was never published, Arbus’s photographs of nudists went on to occupy a significant place in her body of work:  A Family One Evening in a Nudist Camp was chosen by John Szarkowski for the seminal 1967 New Documents exhibition and Arbus’s 1972 retrospective, both at The Museum of Modern Art.