About this artwork
Arbus usually wrote descriptive captions for her pictures, rarely including the names of her subjects. Here she photographs ‘a very young baby’. The baby is Anderson Cooper, now a well-known journalist for American news channel CNN, and the son of the socialite, Gloria Vanderbilt and her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper. The photograph is unsettling; unlike most of Arbus’s portraits in which the camera confronts the subject directly, the baby’s eyes are closed making the portrait oddly distant. And unlike conventional photographs people make of their children – laughing and pink-cheeked – Arbus fills the frame with his sleeping face in an extreme close-up that renders his skin waxy and pale. Eerily, the photograph appears more like a death mask or a nineteenth-century death portrait than a picture of a sleeping child.
Updated before 2020
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artist:Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971) American
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title:A very young baby, N.Y.C. 1968
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date created:1968; printed after 1971
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materials:Gelatin silver print on paper
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measurements:36.70 x 37.00 cm (framed: 62.00 x 61.80 x 2.00 cm)
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object type:
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credit line:ARTIST ROOMS National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Art Fund, 2008
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accession number:AR00548
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gallery:
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Born in New York City, she was working as a fashion photographer before she began to pursue an artistic career. Arbus made portraits of people from across society, but is best known for her powerful images of people...