"A PHOTOGRAPH IS A SECRET ABOUT A SECRET"

ARBUS, Diane. Diane Arbus. Millerton, New York: Aperture, (1972). Tall quarto, original cream laminated photographic boards, original photographic dust jacket. $3800.

First edition, first printing of Arbus' highly influential photobook, with 80 finely printed black-and-white plates, images "at once pitiless and engaged, tough and surprisingly tender… with the power to provoke and disturb" (Roth), in original dust jacket.

"A photograph," Diane Arbus once said, "is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." In this fundamental collection of her work, published posthumously, Arbus offers "a beautiful, sad, moving testament to the human condition" (Parr & Badger I:258). "Arbus' unique way of not turning a blind eye satisfies something in us… In her photographs the thrill of being left out contends with the dread" (London Review of Books). "Her pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most so-called documentary photography has been assumed to rest… Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed" (John Szarkowski). Includes iconic images such as "Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, 1970" and "Identical twins, Roselle, N.J." First edition, first printing, with "Two Girls in Identical Raincoats, Central Park, N.Y.C, 1969," suppressed in subsequent printings. Roth, 214. Open Book, 284.

A beautiful copy in fine condition.