Depth of field Diane Arbus

I am doing some research into photographers who demonstrate depth of field so i can give my opinions on there work. The first photographer i am looking into is Diane Arbus, she was an american photographer born in 1924 in New York city to a wealthy jewish family. She had shown artistic talent from a young age creating drawings and paintings in high school. Diane married her childhood sweetheart when she was 18. Her husband, Allan Arbus was a photographer and they built up a successfull photography business together, working in advertising and fashion photography, they work for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar . In 1956 Diane wanted to create work on her own and quit her business, around the this time she went to study with Lisette Model.  Lisette encouraged Diane to find her own style and helped her identify the sort of subjects she wanted to photography and what she wanted to get out of her photographs.
Diane started to walk around the street of New York City visiting seedy hotel rooms, walking through public parks and even visiting a morgue looking for unusual people. Some would say she took portraiture photographs of freaks or people who were diffrent but whether she was taking photographs of "Freaks" or people of a normal appearence her photographs always had an abnormal, surreal feel to them. Diane would capture square portraits of transvestites, dwarfs, giants or people who's apperance's aren't what the world would call normal she would also take photographys of mentally disturbed people.  By the mid-1960's she had become a well-astablished photographer. She also taught photography for a while in the 60's.
Diane was well known for her ability to capture diffrent sides and emotions of people with disabilities from unusual backgrounds, she wanted wanted people to see them how they really were. Her photographs where mostly taken in black and white and
 Many of her portraits were taken in natural or existing light with much of the focus on her subjects’ facial expressions and unique mannerisms.


                                 Identical twins

                               Boy with a flag

 A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street

A young Brooklyn family going for a sunday outing

              Girl with a cigar

 

 

 

 When i first started researching into Diane Arbus i thought her photographs where very morbid and depressing. But her portraites tell a story about the subject/s. I think the photos work well in black and white. I don't think i'd be able to have one of these photos hanging up in my home  but i do like the idea of the photographs she took. She got to know her subjects and studied them. There are diffrent thoughts on her work, some people would say it is cruel to take photographs of less fortunate people but other people thought she made people who were "freaks" normal, she respected her subjects for who they were. The photographs that i have put on here, i think, show short depth of field these are all portraiture photographs and Diane would have used a lardge aperture so that her subject was in focus and the background was blurry.