Diane Arbus: Social Security

A vivid look at how Diane Arbus made photographs about American retirees in the 1960s.

In the spring of 1969, Diane Arbus spent a week in St. Petersburg, Florida, photographing Americans who received Social Security. Hired by the Social Security Administration to promote awareness of the benefit program, Arbus made more than one thousand photographs that fulfilled the terms of the assignment but also embodied her distinct, instantly recognizable vision. In Diane Arbus: Social Security, Adrienne Lundgren presents a selection from this virtually unknown archive, held for decades at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and tells the story of Arbus’s work in Florida through her travel notes and correspondence. Unlike Arbus’s portraits made famous by her posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and her 1972 Aperture Monograph—images that have provoked both admiration and controversy—these photographs have remained unseen, making Social Security an essential document about the working process of a singularly influential photographer.