Diane Arbus 1923-1971

Acquired by the present owner from the photographer

Other prints of this image:

Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at The Museum of Modern Art), unpaginated

Sandra Phillips, Doon Arbus, et al., Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), p. 253    

Thomas Southall, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (Aperture, 1984, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas), p. 163

Douglas Nickel, Picturing Modernity: Highlights from the Photography Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pl. 54

Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, Editors, Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (London: Tate Modern, 2003), p. 236

The photograph offered here, printed by Arbus and titled by her on the reverse, is foremost among the series of studies Arbus made of nudists, one of many subcultures that she would investigate and photograph during her career.   In 1963, Diane Arbus began photographing the patrons of several nudist camps in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  This project continued into the mid-1960s and yielded a number of photographs that are among Arbus’s most iconic.  Man and Wife in the Living One Room of a Nudist Camp, NJ. 1963, as it is titled here, is one of the best-known photographs from this series.  The image was one of a group of seven Arbus photographs acquired from the photographer by The Museum of Modern Art in 1964.  In 1965, the Museum included their print of this image in its Recent Acquisitions: Photography exhibition.  Under the title Married Couple at Home, Nudist Camp, New Jersey, it was one of twenty Arbus photographs included in the Museum’s groundbreaking 1967 New Documents exhibition, the first major showing of the photographer’s work.  Arbus herself selected this image for her sole portfolio, A Box of Ten Photographs, conceived in 1969, which served for Arbus as a statement of her achievement in photography thus far.  There titled Retired Man and His Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp one Morning, N. J., 1963, it is the only nudist camp image included.

Aside from the print of the image offered here, it is believed that there are five other prints made by Arbus extant.  Two of these are in institutional collections: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired from Arbus in 1964), and the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena (purchased in 1970).  Three are currently believed to be in private collections. 

Arbus received a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1963 to execute ‘photographic studies of American rites, manners and customs.’  Nudists and nudist camps had fascinated Arbus, and her ongoing work with this subject matter dovetailed with her other projects at the time.  In these, she focused on groups of people apart from the mainstream of American culture.  In 1965, two years into her nudist camp project, Arbus proposed an article on the subject to Esquire editor Harold Hayes.   Hayes officially assigned the story to her, and Arbus drafted an article to accompany her photographs.   This text, infused with Arbus’s wry humor, describes the surreal juxtapositions she encountered while interacting with nudists: 

‘Some ladies wear beach hats or sunglasses or wedgies or curlers or earrings and pocketbooks.  In the cafeteria the teenage waitresses wear organdy demi-aprons.  Some men have only a wristwatch, or shoes and socks with their cigarettes and money tucked into their socks for safekeeping.  Sometimes you see someone wearing nothing but a bandaid or a pencil behind their ear or walking a dog on a leash. Nudists aren’t purists.  Occasionally they even feel the impulse to slip into something more comfortable’ (Revelations, p. 167).

Ultimately, Esquire declined to publish the feature. 

In Man and Wife in the Living One Room of a Nudist Camp, NJ. 1963, Arbus’s ability to combine the banal and the extraordinary in one photograph is masterfully demonstrated.  In the image, a mundane cottage living room is transformed by the presence of its two nude denizens, as well as by the nude photographs on display upon the wall and television set.  Arbus captured the strangeness of her experience in the nudist camp when she wrote: ‘There is not much to it, you might say.  It’s like walking into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it is’ (ibid., p. 167).