A Box of Ten Photographs

In conjunction with the Annual Review Santa Fe Photo Festival, October 17 – 20, 2019. John Jacob, Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents A Box of Ten Photographs: The Odyssey of Diane Arbus.

In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. A the time of her death in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A Box of Ten Photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. This presentation draws on my research for Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs, the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the portfolio. Using the recorded voices of those who knew and worked with her, it tracks the evolution of an Arbus canon grounded in her work on the portfolio; the solidification of that canon as a consequence of her untimely death; and the emergence of discourse as institutions sought to accommodate and respond to its challenges. Considered in relation to the portfolio, the odyssey of Diane Arbus is the odyssey of photography itself — of a filed and its language. Bridging Arbus’s career with that of photography as we know it was the portfolio, A Box of Ten Photographs.