DIANE ARBUS: Art and Mental Health Deeper Dive Recap

Complicated family dynamics, history of depression, multilayered sexuality, and other things that may have helped shape the direction of the photographer's creativity

Apr 28, 2024

As I continue evolving what and how I share through the Substack platform, I have begun doing a monthly “deeper dive” which is a series of 5-7 posts about a specific artist, sharing more about the relationship between art and mental health than I might in a single essay.

For this month’s deeper dive, I looked at the art and mental health of photographer Diane Arbus. The posts in this series were:

Diane Arbus' Risk-Taking Behavior Resulted In A Legacy of Outstanding Photographs ... Was It Motivated By Depression?

Kathryn Vercillo

Apr 23

Diane Arbus' Risk-Taking Behavior Resulted In A Legacy of Outstanding Photographs ... Was It Motivated By Depression?

Diane Arbus had documented periods of depression as early as age 11. Her mother also suffered from depression, so there might be a genetic and/or an intergenerational trauma component to her condition. Biographers and scholars have speculated about the possible influence of bipolar disorder on her behavior, citing manic episodes and impulsive tendencies. If it’s true that she lived with unipolar (major) depression and further if it’s true that she was unusually sexual (again, take that with a grain of salt) and that she pursued her art in situations that felt dangerous to her, there could be another explanation: perhaps Arbus was simply trying to feel something.

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The Complicated Family Dynamics in the Life and Work of Diane Arbus

Kathryn Vercillo

Apr 25

The Complicated Family Dynamics in the Life and Work of Diane Arbus

I want to return to the book chapter that I wrote and the discussion of Diane Arbus’s sexuality. More specifically, I want to turn to the way that fuzzy boundaries in her family of origin might have potentially impacted her mental health and her art.

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In Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, did Diane Arbus Capture the Essence of Depression in Another Woman?

Kathryn Vercillo

Apr 24

In Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, did Diane Arbus Capture the Essence of Depression in Another Woman?

Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, is a photograph that Diane Arbus took in 1969, the same year that she started her final series featuring institutionalized women. On the surface, the woman pictured here couldn’t be more different from those women. This perfectly coiffed socialite is poised on a park bench, pearls around her neck, a stark contrast to the women with mental challenges who we picture in an institution. The dichotomy represents the two different sides of Arbus: the wealthy woman who ran in circles of elite people and the woman who didn’t feel like she fit in there and sought out the world’s misfits.

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Looking: Diane Arbus' Depictions of Disability, Neurodiversity and "Difference"

Kathryn Vercillo

Apr 26

Looking: Diane Arbus' Depictions of Disability, Neurodiversity and "Difference"

I want to share with you some quotes/excerpts/thoughts from others about how the photographs that she took represent disability, neurodiversity, mental health challenges, and “difference”. My hope is that these excerpts from others might expose you to works of Diane Arbus that you don’t know and/or provide insights into the way that she depicted people that go beyond what I’ve already shared in the previous posts in this series.

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The Most Interesting Work I Found Inspired By Diane Arbus

Kathryn Vercillo

Apr 27

The Most Interesting Work I Found Inspired By Diane Arbus

The work that I’m doing in this world is to research the nuances of the relationship between art and mental health so that we can move away from exactly these tropes of the suffering genius and get into the shades of gray about what that really means. So I appreciate the playwright’s goal not to shy away from the pain in Diane Arbus’s psyche but also not to center that in some idealized way.

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Diane Arbus' Risk-Taking Behavior Resulted In A Legacy of Outstanding Photographs ... Was It Motivated By Depression?

The Complicated Family Dynamics in the Life and Work of Diane Arbus

In Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, did Diane Arbus Capture the Essence of Depression in Another Woman?

Looking: Diane Arbus' Depictions of Disability, Neurodiversity and "Difference"

The Most Interesting Work I Found Inspired By Diane Arbus

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