The beginning of Diane Arbus’s career started after she married her husband, Allan Arbus, at 18, when she found a passion for photography after World War II. The couple worked with New York Magazine, Vogue, Glamour, and Seventeen in New York City, where she had lived her whole life. They initially started their career as fashion photographers while working in a commercial photography business for ten years till they were able to open their own successful business called Allan and Diane Studio.  Arbus was in charge of creating the style for their shoots, while her husband handled the technical side of things while always encouraging her to pursue her creativity by taking her own pictures. Arbus hated the world of fashion and began to suffer from a deep depression, which is when she decided to quit styling in 1957 and started pursuing her own career independently, which at the time went against the model of women.  By 1960, she had separated from her husband and started studying with Alexei Brodovitch.  Arbus still maintained a career as a solo commercial photographer for eleven years while creating her other work on the side, and in those years, she published over 250 images for more than 70 magazine articles.  Harper’s Bazaar Magazine was one of the famous and most frequent fashion magazines that Arbus worked on by herself , showing her style through the woman’s facial expression and the position she is in. The seriousness in the woman’s face with the eyes looking at the viewer almost as if she is watching while showing the woman having one eye bigger than the other and her body being positioned in a pose that seems awkward and uncomfortable while she pushes out her stomach; is how Arbus begins to start the technique of capturing and shining a light on the flaws and insecurities of others. The way she showed the big poof at the top of the shoulders instead of facing the model forwards makes the observer feel drawn to the poof and follow the one piece up towards the model's face, along with down the front of her body to see the stance she is in. This was her way of breaking the patterns that most photographers used, which made her mark in photography.   

Works Cited 

Estrin, James. "Diane Arbus: [Obituary (Obit); Biography]." New York Times, 11 Mar., 2018. ProQuest, https://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/ne....

Mac Austin, Hillary . “Diane Arbus | Jewish Women’s Archive.” Jwa.org, 2010, jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/arbus-diane.

Smee, Sebastian. "Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting 'freaks.' We misunderstood her art." The Washington Post, 02 Oct., 2022. ProQuest, https://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/ne....

“Diane Arbus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus.