Born to the wealthy Nemerov family in New York in 1923, the photographer Diane Arbus married young and got her start helping her husband, Allan, shoot ads for her family’s department store. After ending the collaboration — and her marriage — she turned to a unique kind of candid portraiture, shooting insightful, evasive, disquieting photographs, both of people she met on the street and of more unusual people, like circus performers, whom she sought out.
Her work got her magazine commissions and artistic acclaim, including a central role in the 1967 Museum of Modern Art show “New Documents.” But she made relatively few exhibition-quality prints, sold only four copies of her now iconic portfolio “A Box of Ten Photographs” — which includes “Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.” and a Jewish giant at home in the Bronx — and in 1971, at the age of 48, she took her own life.
Arthur Lubow, author of a biography of Arbus, wrote in 2003 that she was “fearless, tenacious, vulnerable,” and people opened up to her. But as she said herself in Artforum in 1971: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
So it’s no surprise that “Diane Arbus: Constellation,” the largest show of Arbus’s startling and mesmerizing photographs ever mounted, was unnerving, or that my first reflex was to search for something familiar. Now at the Park Avenue Armory, the exhibition includes every black-and-white silver gelatin print that the photographer Neil Selkirk has made from Arbus’s negatives since her death in 1971.
Arbus’s companion, Marvin Israel, chose Selkirk to help prepare a monograph in the wake of her suicide, and he remains the only person Arbus’s estate has ever allowed to print her photographs. Over five and a half decades this has amounted to 454 of the eerie and obsessive photographs that made her so famous: the twins, triplets, children in masks, nudists, men with tattoos or pins through their cheeks, sword swallowers, dancing couples and awkward celebrities.
Confronting all these people at once would be overwhelming even without the show’s slightly over-the-top spotlights and shadows. The design, which the curator Matthieu Humery also used when showing these photos at the Luma Foundation at Arles, France, in 2023, is otherwise lucid and inventive, but I still felt an initial rush of panic.
He has arranged the photos in thoughtful but deliberately unsystematic groups on free-standing metal lattices peppered with cloudy mirrors. (The pictures are numbered for easy reference to a checklist, but the list itself is in random order and bears no relation to the layout.) Still, I was grateful to find those identical twins from Roselle in their identical black dresses, the adorable moppet carrying a toy hand grenade around Central Park, the “Triplets in their bedroom, N.J.”
As I wandered around the exhibit, though, the familiar images came to feel less like touchstones and more like launchpads into the deep. I tried to hold onto the more obvious repetitions and similarities, like Arbus’s taste for arranging people in groups that don’t quite cohere, or the consistently disillusioned expression she found in her subjects’ eyes. (When you discover a real smile, as in “Mr. and Mrs. Herbert von Karajan, N.Y.C.” or “A Jewish couple dancing, N.Y.C.,” it’s disconcerting.)
Arbus produced some incredible photographs in Coney Island, at Hubert’s Freak Museum in Times Square and in assorted nudist colonies: “A husband and wife in the woods at a nudist camp, N.J.” has the eerie eternity of a Dutch medieval painting, while “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md.” somehow looks like a statue, a ship’s prow and a giant all at once.
But her people, assembled in such quantity, began to swim before my eyes, and I started thinking that Arbus’s real subject as a photographer may have been simply the color black. In the matte cloaks and jackets of her early “Nuns and their charges,” the tone is emotionally neutral, even friendly, and in a portrait of Bertold Brecht’s widow, the black background has the inky grandeur of outer space.
Arbus printed her photos so dark, and shot so many people outdoors, that the forests of New Jersey and foliage of Central Park inevitably take on a fraught psychological resonance, like so many stand-ins for some unnameable part of the human character, or of her own. In “James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theater, N.Y.C.,” the singer, smiling mischievously in a featureless tuxedo, looks like a supernatural shadow come to life.
However I approached it, though, I couldn’t find a way to grasp the exhibit as a whole. Every Arbus portrait — or at least every one Arbus shot after exchanging her 35-millimeter camera for a medium format camera with square, 6-by-6 negatives — is its own primordial encounter with otherness, and before long I decided that the only viable way to engage with her work, even in this thrilling cacophony of examples, would be to focus on one photograph at a time. For me, the one that spoke most clearly was “Masked woman in a wheelchair, Pa.,” 1970-1972.
Stretched out in her chair, the woman could be posing, but the photo could also be a candid. Holding an exaggerated witch mask in front of her face, she seems, paradoxically, to be revealing her real self rather than hiding it, as if authenticity can only be found through artifice, or vulnerability made safe only by evasion.
Selkirk was first brought in because it seemed too risky to count on a book designer not losing or damaging the prints that Arbus had made herself. He started by duplicating the images in “A box of ten photographs,” clearly finished the way Arbus had wanted them. He quickly discovered something about how she worked.
“Everybody else shoots a photograph and then goes into the darkroom and starts manipulating the image to optimize it,” he told me. “She did not. Diane Arbus understood that the world of people out there, every one of them who had the benefit of sight, looked at pictures all the time. They got their snapshots back from the drugstore, and they looked at pictures in the newspaper, and both of those types of image had absolute credibility. No one doubted them.”
While other photographers shine more or less light on a developing photograph to make certain areas brighter than others, “it became evident that the only way to duplicate her prints was to keep your hands out of the way of the goddamn enlarger.”
The vast majority of the images in “Diane Arbus: Constellation” were printed at least once, in some form, by Arbus herself, but many haven’t been seen before. (The exhibition organizers wouldn’t provide an exact number but noted that “Diane Arbus Revelations,” the largest show before this one and largest publication to date, includes only 200.)
By keeping his hands, as he says, out of the way of the enlarger as he pressed on from the “Box of 10 photos” to negatives for which her intentions were less clear, Selkirk created a consistent aesthetic that has as good a claim as any to represent Arbus’s own.
The matter-of-fact newsiness that he describes, in combination with unusual subjects and subtly uncanny poses, give the viewer an inimitable sense of witnessing something occult, of confronting something at once omnipresent and unspeakable. It’s the mirror and dark floor in “Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C.,” the shadows in “Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C.,” the patient defiance of “Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C.”: There’s always something to tip you off that this is no ordinary occasion.
Of course, there’s no way to know how Arbus’s art might have developed if she had lived longer or sold more during her lifetime, or what she would want to happen with it now. There’s no getting around the fact that this exhibition, like every print or exhibition made after her death, is a collaboration among Arbus; Selkirk; the estate, led by her daughter, Doon; and the galleries that represent the estate, Fraenkel Gallery and David Zwirner.
But that’s always true after artists die, and in this case, the questions that come up happen to mirror those raised by Arbus herself: What is real? What is true? Is there anything really stable in human experience? Who are we?
Diane Arbus: Constellation
Through Aug. 17, the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; 212-933-5812, armoryonpark.org.
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
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