Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer known for direct, frontal, square-format portraits of subjects who existed outside the social mainstream, including circus and sideshow performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, and other individuals and families photographed in their own homes, streets, and familiar surroundings. She often built close personal relationships with her subjects before photographing them, and her pioneering use of flash in daylight isolated her subjects against their surroundings and gave many of her images a distinctive, almost surreal quality. Arbus's willingness to photograph people and communities that earlier documentary photography had largely ignored expanded the accepted subject matter of the medium and made her one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.