‘‘For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.’’
—Diane Arbus
This fresh-to-auction portrait of an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike was captured in 1969 while Diane Arbus was in London on an assignment for ground-breaking women’s magazine Nova (1965-1975). For her proposed story ‘People Who Think They Look Like Other People’, Arbus photographed people who thought they looked like famous people. The subjects were discovered after the magazine placed the following advertisement in The Times and the Evening Standard, generating an astounding response: ‘Have you ever been told you look the double of someone famous? Like Elizabeth Taylor...Twiggy, The Queen, Mick Jagger, Sir Winston Churchill? If you think you are the double of someone famous, you could be famous too.’
Peter Crookston, Arbus’s former editor at Nova remembers her passion for seeing and recording life:
[She] had an insatiable curiosity about people and how they live. As an artist, she wanted to convey an impression of these lives in her own particular way through the medium of her camera. She could do this by stopping people on the streets or in the park in New York, as she frequently did – but journalism gave her access to other, more intimate worlds.
Arbus’s undeniable genius for creating enduring photographs that transcend the printed page is evident in the present work.
This lifetime print of Arbus’s evocative image of an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike is part of a curated selection of five exceptional portraits of women by Arbus (lots 22-26) from an Important Collection, UK.