A new exhibition of the photographer’s early work provides clues to where she found her subject matter and how she honed her confrontational style
It is impossible to know whether Diane Arbus’s early pictures would carry quite the same sense of foreboding if we knew nothing about her suicide, aged 48, in 1971, or her fascination with people she frequently referred to fondly as “freaks”, the eccentrics, dwarves, transvestites, impersonators, the mentally challenged, who she believed could be metaphors for the human condition, appearing, as she wrote, “somewhere further out than we do”. The idea that her portraits revealed a person’s inner psychology rather than just their outward appearance was widely taken up after her death, when she became the leading representative of a new form of subjective documentary photography, conferring importance on people who had previously been hidden from or rejected by society, legitimising them with her camera.
She was fascinated by difference: the difference between how people looked and how they thought they looked; between the character they had created and the person beneath the disguise. Most of all she admired those who had accepted, even celebrated, their difference and stood before her camera on their own terms. “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” she once said. “Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed the test in life. They’re aristocrats.”