Three rooms comprising 69 black and white photographs, including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: Box of Ten, 1971.

Diane Arbus pioneered a photographic approach that bridges the gap between documentary and fine art. Through her work she explores the lives, inner emotions and exotic appearances of ordinary people. Her subjects transcend social convention and establish an intense relationship with the viewer through the directness of their gaze. In so doing they reveal Arbus’ method which relied upon a sense of trust between the artist and her sitter. Arbus studied photography during the 1940s and 50s in New York and her first published photograph appeared in Esquire in 1960, she began making portraits in the early 1960s and was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships.

In 1970 Arbus embarked on a project to create a series of limited editions of her work, but tragically committed suicide shortly after the first Box of Ten was produced. Less than a dozen copies of this work were printed before the artist’s death, making the body of work in The d’Offay Donation - put together in collaboration with the artist’s daughter and the Trustees of her Estate - one of the best Arbus collections in existence.