Diane Arbus started taking pictures in the early 1940s and went on to study photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and later, Lisette Model. Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967, she was one of three photographers to be included in the landmark exhibition, New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A year after her death she was the first American photographer to have work selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale.

The Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective that travelled through the United States and Canada from 1972–1975. In 2003, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised Revelations, a full-scale retrospective that then toured to museums in the United States and Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2005–2006). In 2009, the National Museum Cardiff presented an exhibition of Arbus’s works as part of the Artist Rooms collection created by Anthony d’Offay.

The most recent retrospective, Diane Arbus, began at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2011, travelling to the Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and Foam, Amsterdam, through 2013.

Arbus’s work has been surveyed in substantial publications, including: Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972); Magazine Work (1984); Untitled (Aperture, 1995); Diane Arbus Revelations (Jonathan Cape, Random House, 2003); and Diane Arbus: A Chronology (Aperture, 2011).

Diane Arbus was born in 1923 in New York City, where she died in 1971. Public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.