Diane Arbus

A half-hour documentary on Diane Arbus, posted on YouTube in four parts. Made in 1972 after her death that year.

“Diane Arbus was my mother. [...] In July 1971 my mother committed suicide and shortly after that Marvin Israel, a very close friend of hers, and I felt that we wanted to do a book of her work together. So we began collecting not just the pictures but whatever material we could find. In 1970 she had given a class in Westbeth, which was where she lived. And we found out that one of the students in that class was a Japanese photographer named Nikko Nakahara who admired Diane’s work enormously. The problem was that he barely spoke any English at all, so what he had done was to go to the classes and bring along a tape recorder to record everything that was said so that afterwards he could go home and see if he could try and understand it. So he leant us those tapes. The tapes were of very poor quality, so we asked Mary Claire Costello, who was a friend of Diane’s, to read Diane’s words over glimpses of her photographs.” –Doon Arbus