Diane Arbus

Photographer
American·b. 1923

Known for: intimate portraits of people on the social margins

Diane Arbus spent most of her career photographing people at the margins of American society — circus performers, nudists, transgender women, twins — with a directness and formal sympathy that had little precedent. She was among the first photographers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1963. Her posthumous retrospective at MoMA in 1972 drew more visitors than any photography exhibition the museum had staged to that point.

Gear & Materials(2)

The 2.8F, produced from 1960 to 1981, is the final production version of the twin-lens Rolleiflex. It uses a Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 taking lens and produces 6×6cm negatives on 120 film.

Documented in Patricia Bosworth's biography and in Arbus's own correspondence; she adopted the Rolleiflex in the early 1960s.

The C330 is a twin-lens reflex medium format camera producing 6×6cm negatives on 120 film. Unlike the Rolleiflex, its taking and viewing lenses are interchangeable, and its bellows focusing system allows for close-up work without extension tubes.

She later worked with the Mamiya C330, which gave her the close-focusing capability she needed for the tighter portraits of her late career.

Know something Diane Arbus uses that's not listed?

Log in to submit