Toyland® 10cm Plastic Toy Hand Grenade - With Lights & Sound - Fancy Dress - Party Bag Fillers.

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Arbus engages with the event with a critical lens into the otherwise superficial meaning of ceremonies that make up our everyday existence. Her portrayal of judgment requires of us to ask ourselves if there is any one true meaning of the conventions of physical female beauty. Arbus wrote, "It took about ten hours of interviews, sashaying, and performing what they called their talent and the poor girls looked so exhausted by the effort to be themselves that they continually made the fatal mistakes which were in fact themselves..." The photograph Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, by Diane Arbus, shows a boy, with the left strap of his shorts hanging off his shoulder, tensely holding his long, stringy, thin arms by his side. Clenched in his right hand is a toy replica hand grenade (an Mk 2 "Pineapple"), his left hand is held in a claw-like gesture, and his facial expression is maniacal.

Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus (Creative Arts Television Archive, Contemporary Arts Media (distributor), 1972).American photographer Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923. Known for her images of individuals on the fringes of society, including dwarfs, circus performers, the mentally ill, and transgendered persons, Arbus was one of the 20th century’s most provocative artists.

Arbus's curiosity made her search for an unseen world, as she said of her upbringing, "the outside world was so far from us," and this led her to develop a kinship to the underrepresented, the misunderstood, and the strange. These thoughts transfixed her and preoccupied her mind for the rest of her career. She openly called her subjects on the fringes of society, "freaks", which in her eyes, was not derogatory. She said that, "(freaks) don't have to go through life dreading what may happen, it's already happened. They've passed their test. They're aristocrats." These individuals were stigmatized in their public life, but through photography, become the source of wonder and fascination for an audience to gaze infinitely. Despite this admitted numbness to joy and pain, Diane Arbus had a striking ability to pull the drama out of any situation and illuminate it through portrait photography. One of her most famous photographs, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, NYC is exemplary of this skill. The photograph is a powerful image of a knobby-kneed, dirt-stained boy holding a plastic grenade in the park, his mouth set into a grim, serious expression and his eyes bursting wildly out from the image. Author Deborah Nelson explains how this photograph was number eight in a set of eleven that Diane took of the boy, none of which were particularly remarkable, except for this one. In all of the other images, he looks like a normal, happy little boy playing in the park. In the photo she chose to print and publish, he looks entirely different. Perhaps this wildness reflects his true self, and Arbus was only able to capture it in one frame. Or perhaps the boy is a symbol, representative of a certain excitement or intensity Arbus was seeking from life and from the people that she encountered. Arbus found intrigue and conjured beauty in unlikely subjects, and made remarkable portraits of people that were not often deemed "fit" to be in front of the lens of a camera. She sought out unique characters on the fringes of society for her work, and said to this, "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them." This went a long way from the art that is often thought to be reserved only for the aesthetically pleasing, as opposed to showing the "real" or "true" world. Alex Mar, “The Cost of Diane Arbus's Life on the Edge,” The Cut, July 12, 2016, https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/diane-arbus-c-v-r.html. This is one of the most significant photographic images in the history of fine art photography,” she added, noting that the image is colored by the spirit of the 1960s and the escalation of the Vietnam War.Her findings eventually led her to receive a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph "American Rites, Manners, and Customs" in 1963. In her proposal she wrote, "I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present, I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful." This opened up doors for Arbus, and she was awarded a renewal for the Guggenheim grant in 1965, and again in 1966. Of this she wrote, "The Fellowship enabled me to go far enough to find the way to go further. I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another." In 1941, David Nemerov hired Allan and Diane to photograph models for Russek's newspaper advertisements. Diane took to designing and styling the fashion models, while Allan photographed the models and perfected the photos in the dark room. Shortly after, they began publishing with major fashion publications such as, Vogue, Glamour, and Harper's Bazaar, which placed the Arbus' among the likes of other noted names in fashion photography such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.