About the Production

In creating his imaginary portrait of the great American photographer Diane Arbus, director Steven Shainberg has made a film that, like the work and the artist it celebrates, is both daring and mysterious. Eschewing conventional biography, FUR takes the bold step of merging reality and fantasy to explore the emergence of a singularly brilliant artist. It takes us through the looking glass into an invented world of marvelous sights and complex humanity. Set in 1958, the year the real Arbus effectively embarked on her solo career as photographer, FUR is a startling combination of fairy tale, psychological study, period piece, and love story. Above all, FUR reflects Shainberg’s personal understanding of and love for this most personal of artists.

Well before Arbus was a legend, Steven Shainberg was growing up in a New York City townhouse lined with her photos. Arbus was a close friend of Shainberg’s uncle, the writer Lawrence Shainberg, who occasionally bought her work and received photographs as gifts from the then-unknown photographer. At the time, Arbus was struggling to make a living from her art, which was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, particularly her portraits of people studiously ignored or derided in conventional society. Still, Arbus admired and was fascinated by these “freaks” --individuals with physical and/or psychological abnormalities, circus performers, transvestites, etc.

Shainberg knew these unusual photos in his childhood home as simply the work of his uncle’s friend. “I never met Diane. But she was very much a part of my parents’ adult world ‘out there’; it was very mysterious and intriguing. The images themselves I think were a fundamental part of my visual upbringing. In the same way that someone’s parents might read Dr. Seuss to them every night, I would walk up to my room and pass a picture of the Jewish Giant!” he marvels, referring to the famous Arbus photo of 495-pound, 8-foot-tall “Jewish Giant” Eddie Carmel and his parents.

Shainberg vividly remembers the first Arbus photo to have made a deep, conscious impression on him. “It was at the top of the stairs from the second to the third floor, right outside my parents’ bedroom. It was two teenagers standing on a street. He’s wearing a kind of a knee-length dark raincoat and he’s standing besides his girlfriend. I remember coming home from school one day and stopping and looking at the photograph, and not being able to tell if the subjects in it were adolescents or 50-year-old adults. And I remember thinking how peculiar that was. I was perplexed by just that essential, simple question. In a way, that started me looking at and questioning what is going on in photographs in general.”

As an adult, Shainberg has collected Arbus photos for his own extensive collection of American photography. He had long nurtured the hope of making a film about her. In this, he was not alone.