"My favourite thing is to go where I've never been." --diane arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer known for her intimate black-and-white portraits of eccentric individuals. Born in 1923 in New York City, she worked for fashion magazines before becoming a professional artist. Her images depict transvestites, midgets, circus performers, awkward children, mental patients, and identical twins--people to whom she referred as "characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups."

Although her photographs are seemingly simple and straightforward, there is a complexity that emerges with a second glance. Many of her photographs were taken in New York's inner city neighborhoods, where she found society's outcasts. Her photos manifest their sense of loneliness, a loneliness that came not only from the people she photographed, but from Arbus herself; she committed suicide in 1971.

Her art forces you to use your mind as well as your eyes. Her photographs question society's cultural assumptions, while she in turn questions the photograph as an accurate form of representation. --jusania