Diane Arbus
1963
Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C.

Gelatin silver print
14 1/4 x 14 1/4 ins (36.2 x 36.2 cm)
 
Swann Galleries - New York
Fine Photographers, 19 February 2015, Sale 2374, Lot 121
 
Diane Arbus was among the boldest, most innovative and uncompromising artists to explore photography as a form of creative expression. Her iconography of powerful portraits, which quickly developed during the 1960s, captured the changing zeitgeist of the American social landscape.
 
The year this picture was made (1963), Arbus applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and asked Lisette Model to provide a letter of recommendation. Model's letter read, in part: "Photographers can be good, bad, excellent, first rate, or tops, but there are hardly any artists among them. Here is an exception." Later that year, Arbus was awarded a fellowship to pursue a project relating to "photographic studies of American rites, manners and customs."
 
Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972), unpaginated.
 
Diane Arbus, Revelations, p. 102.
 
LL/57683