Nudist lady with swan sunglasses, Pa.

Diane Arbus

1965 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Among Diane Arbus’s most celebrated studies of nudist life, this photograph was one of five on the subject included in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Documents, an influential 1967 group show that featured her work alongside that of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Arbus met the picture’s subject in 1965 at Sunny Rest, a nudist camp in Pennsylvania. Carefully coiffed and accessorized, the woman poses with practiced panache. As Arbus noted in an essay on the camps, “Most people are not entirely nude. Some ladies wear beach hats or sunglasses or wedgies and curlers or earrings and pocketbooks. . . . Nudists aren’t purists.”

Artist

Diane Arbus

Date

1965

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Koichiro Yamakawa, in celebration of the Museum's 150th Anniversary, 2019