Neil Selkirk is a photographer and filmmaker. In the wake of Diane Arbus’s suicide, in 1971, Selkirk was invited by the Arbus Estate to make new prints for her posthumous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—a landmark exhibition widely credited with elevating photography’s popularity and fine-art status. Selkirk became the only person authorized to print from Arbus’s negatives and continued collaborating with the estate until 2007, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her archive. In 2011, Swiss collector and art patron Maja Hoffman purchased a complete set of printing proofs made by Selkirk; all 454 prints are on display now for the very first time in “Diane Arbus: Constellation” at the recently opened Luma Arles. Curated by Matthieu Humery, the show is the largest presentation of Arbus’s work to date: a dizzying installation that allows viewers to encounter her photographs without interpretation and chronology. Below, Selkirk reflects on his relationship with Arbus, the Luma exhibition, and Arbus’s legacy one hundred years since her birth.
I FIRST MET DIANE ARBUS in 1970 while working as an assistant for Hiro, who shared a studio with Richard Avedon. There was a good lunch at Avedon’s studio every day and she and [art director] Marvin Israel would frequently show up for a free meal. I met Marvin and Diane there just because we happened to be in the same space. By coincidence, Hiro had been given the first Pentax 6×7 camera to arrive in the United States from Japan, and he agreed to lend it to Diane. It was an enormous 35-millimeter-style single-lens reflex camera, and it allowed her to relinquish the impact of her presence on her subjects and free herself from the role of the collaborator in order to return to being simply a witness. I showed her how to use it, load it, and operate it. Diane subsequently started calling me occasionally for technical advice on jobs and we conversed periodically.