Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer

A biography of the photographer Diane Arbus by Arthur Lubow that ties the course of her life to the photographs that made her name.

Lubow follows Arbus from a wealthy New York childhood through her years as a successful fashion photographer to the work in which she drew secrets out of her subjects. He draws on interviews with her friends, lovers and colleagues and on previously unknown letters. The book runs to roughly 730 pages. Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, published it in 2016, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review.

Arthur Lubow, born in 1952, is an American journalist who graduated from Harvard in 1974 and has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. The book grew out of his cover story on Arbus for the Times Magazine in September 2003, and by his own account he spent twelve years on research and reporting. It follows Patricia Bosworth's 1984 biography and runs to more than twice its length. Lubow adds material from her psychotherapy conversations that Bosworth did not publish.