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Photography That Captured America’s ‘Outsiders’

Cross-dressers at Casa Susanna.
Cross-dressers at Casa Susanna. Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016

Featuring work by artists like Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus, Outsiders: American Photography and Film 1950s–1980s (out next month from Rizzoli) compiles art that challenged the rigid social rules of the postwar era.

“This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, begins in the 1950s and covers a period of four decades during which American culture underwent profound transformation. The work these artists produced was motivated, in part, by a sense that the status quo was untenable, and that the current expressions of American life did not reflect what they knew and saw of the world,” editor Sophie Hackett writes in a press release. Click ahead to see the world they captured.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016/Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario

Men at Casa Susanna.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016/Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario

Sword swallower by Diane Arbus.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016/Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario

A woman with a crow mask by Diane Arbus.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016/Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario

An interracial couple by Diane Arbus.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016

A picnic by Nan Goldin.

Photo: OUTSIDERS: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s; Skira New York; 2016/Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario

An African-American family in 1970 by Garry Winogrand.

Photography That Captured America’s ‘Outsiders’