This photograph was taken in New York City at the Support Our Men in Vietnam parade in May 1967. Arbus attended many rallies and demonstrations for and against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, drawn to the individuals who allied themselves with either side of the cause. Arbus’s fellow photographer Bob Adelman, who also photographed at these gatherings, observed that Arbus “would never plunge into the crowd like the rest of us who were all going for a sense of immediacy, of grabbing on to the entire vista—we wanted to record the action. But Diane hung back on the fringes—and she’d pick out one face” (quoted in Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography, p. 224). In the years since its making, Patriotic Young Man with a Flag, N.Y.C. has become one of the most recognizable images in Arbus’s oeuvre and demonstrates her ability to create photographs that are simultaneously confrontational and empathetic.

This rare, signed lifetime print was given by Diane Arbus to her friend, the writer Lawrence Shainberg. Shainberg was close to Marvin Israel, the artist and art director whose relationship with Arbus was formative, and he recounts that Arbus presented this print to him and his wife when Arbus and Israel were guests at a New Year’s party. Signed lifetime prints made by Arbus are rare. As of this writing it is believed that only three other lifetime prints of this image have appeared at auction, only two of those signed by Arbus.

Throughout Shainberg’s long literary career he has investigated – in novels, non-fiction, and memoirs – many aspects of modern American life. His body of work includes studies on Norman Mailer, Samuel Beckett, and Zen Master Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi, in Four Men Shaking, as well as basketball in the novel One on One, and the medical profession in Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of his World.