


Diane Arbus, the late renowned photographer, is presently featured in a London exhibition which reveals her ‘grotesquely bleak but brutally truthful vision of humanity’. The cultural critic Susan Sontag condemned Arbus for dwelling on misery and ugliness, calling her work anti-humanist. Her defenders say that Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud and Velázquez, all shared her disenchanted eye. She was deemed to have transformed photography by helping to normalize marginalized groups – cross-dressers, strippers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men.
She was born 14 March 1923 1.30am New York, with wealthy Jewish immigrant parents from Russia who owned a Fifth Avenue fashion department store though all the family including her siblings were creative. At 18 she married Allan Arbus who later acted as the psychiatrist in the tv series MASH. She committed suicide at 48, which as one critic pointed out is reflected in her photography – ‘someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. Her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species.’ She had experienced “depressive episodes” during her life, similar to those experienced by her mother; the episodes may have been made worse by symptoms of hepatitis.
A year after her suicide, she became the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale where her photographs were “the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion” and “extremely powerful and very strange”.
She had a Pisces Sun, the favoured sign for photographers since they incline towards the image and not words. Her Neptune was powerfully aspected in her 8th opposition her Aquarius Moon and Venus square Mars in Taurus. And on one leg of a yod sextile a 10th house Saturn and inconjunct Uranus and South Node (and widely Sun). She also had a creative and confident Water Grand Trine of Pluto in her 7th trine Jupiter in Scorpio trine Uranus which would tend to enclose her in her own bubble of reality.
Her yod focal point Uranus would give her the capacity to be a creative trailblazer and independent-spirited, tending to cut across conventional norms. She would be both divisive in effect as well as a catalyst for change.
What an interesting and desolate woman, swamped in Piscean energy – visionary, expressive, yet imbued with Neptune’s cosmic chilliness and detachment.


























