“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” photographer Diane Arbus once said. “Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” The way we talk about people has come a long way; sadly, the way we treat people has not. Arbus had a knack for capturing the interior lives of people at the fringes: the ‘freak’ in a circus act, the ‘female impersonator’ in a nightclub, an appendage to a boyfriend, an elderly woman in fur wearing white gloves and pearls with bows on her shoes. We can see through Arbus’ lens how these people were treated and the circumstances of their lives; her photographs were and are invitations to engage with others.
Arbus brings us the marginal, the unseen, the forgotten. She reminds us, in her words, that, “The mistake is to think people are sealed and absolute. They are just instruments of life, and it flows through them to the point where their edges are invisible.” It’s the mark of a true artist—one who pushed beyond society’s comfort zone and tapped into the unknown. She is unique and indelible, courageous, devoted to her work, forceful and hard to ignore.
Arbus was born in 1923 in Manhattan and died there at 48 by suicide. In between, she had two daughters with photographer Allan Arbus: Doon and Amy. She photographed, often with accompanying stories in her own words, for Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Sunday Times Magazine and Artforum. Among her subjects were Mae West, film stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish, poets and close friends W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore, Marcel Duchamp and Agnes Martin. A nudist camp, carnival acts such as razor and sword swallowers, contortionists, strippers, “dwarfs” and poor sharecroppers, as well as society’s elite, all became art under her gaze.
Her subjects often stare directly into the camera, offering themselves up to be seen and scrutinized. In some cases, subjects’ self-scrutiny inspired ire. Norman Mailer didn’t appreciate his “spread-legged” New York Times Book Review portrait. Of course he didn’t; it mirrored his self-superiority perfectly. Germaine Greer thought Arbus’ photo of her was an “undeniably bad picture” and called her work “unoriginal.”
Criticism aside, Arbus’ unsentimental photographs earned her two Guggenheim fellowships and sparked long friendships with Richard Avedon and Jay Gold. An exhibition at MoMA in 1967, just four years before her death, presented her work alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Her first major retrospective at MoMA was exhibited one year after her death—the same year she was the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale. She was going strong in her last years, and her daughter Doon wrote, “Her suicide seems neither inevitable nor spontaneous, neither perplexing nor intelligible.” In other words, why?
Today, David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery in L.A. are showing “Cataclysm: The Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited,” an exhibition of 113 photographs that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Arbus’s 1972 posthumous retrospective at MoMA. It’s the first major survey of her work in L.A. in over 20 years. The title, “Cataclysm,” refers to the differences in opinions about Arbus’s work. Some people have praised her unusual images, like documentaries of everyday life. Others, like Susan Sontag, felt they lacked compassion and that Arbus wanted “to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged.” Sontag felt that these photos of the sexual underworld and genetic freaks never showed their emotional distress. “The photographs of deviates and real freaks do not accent their pain but, rather, their detachment and autonomy.”
Arbus herself said that she wanted to show the dignity of people. The viewer can clearly see the difficulties these people live with every day of their life. Their infirmities are undeniable, as are their freakish displays in carnival acts for all to gape at. Arbus chose another view—the bizarre as a real person, just as the subjects had a desire to be seen as normal. Arbus gave them that opportunity, and in turn, dignified them. She did create a lot of uproar and controversy around her work, which I imagine she probably enjoyed. Controversy draws a lot of attention.
It is to Arbus’s credit that she kept photographing these people, often befriending them. She remained friends with the “Jewish giant,” Eddie Carmel, throughout her life, admiring him for never complaining about his condition due to an inoperable pituitary gland tumor. A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., which she photographed the year before she died, shows Carmel towering over his diminutive parents, hunched over in a room too small for him, straining to have a conversation. Another subject was Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room in N.Y.C. The man sports a fedora and groomed mustache, naked except for a draped towel, looking unapologetically into the camera. That these photos provoke and stir us in so many different ways seems to have been Arbus’s intent. The late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl was one of her admirers. “Her greatness, a fact of experience, remains imperfectly understood.”
A wonderful book, Diane Arbus Documents, published by David Zwirner Books along with Fraenkel, is now available. In it is a treasure trove of seventy documents, including articles, criticism and essays from 1967 to the present and pages from her notebooks, with many of her idea lists: “The Secret People, man who swallows dust, chess midget, magicians secrets,” and many more pages in her indelible handwriting.
There are stories about her life that are as controversial as her photographs, like the possibly incestuous relationship with her brother, as well as her sexual forays. But to talk about her private life alongside her work—or the work of any original artist—is a disservice to their craft, devotion and professionalism. Now we even have a published book of Joan Didion’s therapy sessions; her meticulous notes were certainly not for the public. She didn’t revise those sentences as she did with all of the work she published. She worked hard at her sentences, just as Arbus did with her camera.
However, we might feel about an artist’s work, whether we like it or not, that attention still belongs to the work itself. If we give Arbus the kind of long attention she gave to her photographs, we could see past our reactions into observation. To go past the surface and sustain interest—that is what all important work demands, and therein lies appreciation. It’s the least we can do.
“Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited” is showing at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue, L.A., with Fraenkel Gallery through June 21, 2025. It coincides with “Diane Arbus: Constellation,” an exhibition of 450 images that debuted at LUMA Arles in May 2023 and opens at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on June 5, 2025.
