The Art Gallery of Ontario has organized a tasteful, chronological display of 150 images that track the artist’s rapid development as a ground-breaking portraitist and street photographer
Perhaps, half a century after the New York artist Diane Arbus shot her notorious photographs of noble freak-show performers and deluded Fifth Avenue socialites, it is finally time to consider her oeuvre dispassionately as a central achievement in postwar art. Certainly, the Art Gallery of Ontario thinks so. The gallery, which acquired a trove of Arbus photographs in 2017, has organized a tasteful, chronological display of 150 images that track the artist’s rapid development as a ground-breaking portraitist and street photographer. It’s an exhibition that makes little reference to her sad biography, the critical disagreements over her work or the awkward position in which she may place her viewers.
And yet, surely it is that awkwardness that draws us back to Arbus: The creepy similarity of the twins in their party dresses and white collars, the painful folly of a veiled matron photographed too close, the wary hostility of three Puerto Rican women captured outside a restaurant. Arbus pioneered a new dance among photographer, sitter and viewer, introducing an acute subjectivity to portrait photography, and even today that three-step is seldom easy or smooth.
In 2017, after lengthy negotiations with the Arbus estate, the AGO became the second-largest depository of her work after the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which holds her archives. A total of 522 photographs were purchased by Canadian philanthropists Phil Lind, Sandra Simpson, Jay Smith, Robin and David Young, and one anonymous person, and then donated to the gallery.
Working in the early days of art photography, Arbus did not issue numbered editions of her work. About half of these images are prints she made herself at the time; the others are posthumous prints executed by Neil Selkirk, the only person who has permission to work from her negatives since her death by suicide in 1971. So, it’s a rare collection that includes some very familiar images – those twins, the grimacing little boy holding a toy hand grenade in Central Park; Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street – and some new discoveries. In what is, revealingly, the first exhibition to simply present Arbus’s work in chronological order, AGO curator Sophie Hackett follows her career from 1956, when she began her own photography project separate from the commercial studio she operated with her husband Allan Arbus, up to her death 15 years later at the age of 48.