A new retrospective featuring an unprecedented number of the troubled photographer’s images makes the case for her innovative artistry
Diane Arbus’ work was included in only a handful of museum exhibitions before she died, by her own hand, at the age of 48 in 1971. Nevertheless, she had already gained renown with a series of unforgettable images—a “Jewish giant” looming over his bespectacled parents, an elderly couple sitting naked in a nudist-camp cabin, a grimacing boy clutching a toy hand grenade—that seem to reflect our deepest fears and most private wishes.
The first major retrospective of Arbus’ work was held in 1972, a year after her death, at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, where she lived for most of her life. The show drew huge crowds and praise for the humanity and formal beauty of her work. But some found her images disturbing, even repellent: critic Susan Sontag, for example, called her portraits of “assorted monsters and border-line cases. . . . anti-humanist.” Arbus’ work, Sontag wrote, “shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”
Today Arbus, who once said her pictures sought to capture “the space between who someone is and who they think they are,” has become one of America’s best-known photographers and one of its most controversial. But her achievements as an artist have been somewhat overshadowed by her suicide and by the disturbing strangeness that wells up out of her pictures. Famous as a “photographer of freaks,” she has been regarded as something of a freak herself.
Now a new generation of viewers and critics is debating the meaning and significance of Arbus’ compelling, unsettling images, thanks to “Diane Arbus Revelations,” an exhibition of nearly 200 of her pictures on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through May 31. The first Arbus retrospective since the 1972 MOMA show, “Revelations” places her at the center of 20th-century American photography.