Revisiting Diane Arbus’s Final and Most Controversial Series

Early in her photography career, Diane Arbus was perplexed about how to possibly capture the grand mélange of humanity in her work. According to Arbus’s writings (published posthumously by Aperture), her mentor, street photographer Lisette Model, taught her that “the more specific you are” in a photograph, “the more general it’ll be.” Arbus questioned whether she should strive to capture a “generalized human being” in order for her work to be relatable, but Model taught her otherwise—that photographs will resonate with more people if you shed generalities; if you dig deep into the heart of who is in front of your camera. “In a way, this scrutiny has to do with not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like,” Arbus wrote.

The photographer’s unflinching gaze has been both celebrated and criticized since she rose to prominence in the 1960s, and after her death in 1971. Much of that attention is due to the subjects she was most drawn to: sideshow performers, nudists, dwarfs, transgender sex workers—people living on the fringes of society, but who also possessed a strong sense of identity. It’s well-known that Arbus would visit the homes of many of her subjects, who would invite her into their lives; she was able to connect with the people she met in a truly unique way.

Her gaze is most potent in her last body of work, “Untitled” (1969–71), both her most comprehensive and most incomplete series, made at residences for people with developmental disabilities. Much of the work was kept private until it was published in a 1995 monograph put together by her daughter, Doon; 66 images from the series—some never exhibited before—are on view now at David Zwirner in New York.

Arbus was invigorated by the residents, writing to her husband, Allan, in 1969: “It’s the first time I’ve encountered a subject where the multiplicity is the thing.…I am not just looking for the best picture of them. I want to do lots.” She would return to the residences for picnics, dances, and Halloween; in many of the images, her subjects are masked.

But the way that people with developmental disabilities were seen by society in the 1960s differs markedly from today. Genetic disorders such as Down syndrome were treated as if they were mental illnesses, and, during the post-war economic boom, there was a sharp increase in the number of mentally ill and disabled children who were institutionalized because they were seen as a burden.

Arbus, therefore, didn’t make any distinction in her series, as art history professor Frederick Gross pointed out in the book Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience. Even decades later, the reviews following the monograph’s release are jarring to read now. In 1995, a New Yorker critique of the monograph called it “a collection of portraits of the mentally retarded,” and opened with the writer’s personal anecdote about a nephew afflicted with schizophrenia; later, the writer crudely described the resident’s “physiognomies.” (Physiognomy is an outdated pseudoscience that determined personality traits based on facial features, often with racist or sexist undertones.)

Gross noted that Arbus owned several psychology texts about mental illness, and she was particularly fond of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who was critical of its surrounding stigma. Laing, Arbus wrote, “seems so extraordinary in his empathy for madness that it suddenly seemed he would be the most terrific guide.” He also emphasized that her work was a departure from past photography series taken of the institutionalized, which often provoked greater stigma by focusing on the deviance of the subject’s facial features and expressions.

But Arbus’s images in “Untitled” are, at first glance, unsettling. Why did she choose to train her lens repeatedly on people who were so vulnerable? There’s baggage to the work, knowing that she often proclaimed her love for photographing “freaks”—a caustic word to use today, though Arbus seemed to do so with affection. Critic Susan Sontag famously railed against Arbus’s practice in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, saying her work was “based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.”

“Othering” is a term we are especially cautious about today. Arbus did come from privilege—she was the middle child in a well-to-do Manhattan family that earned its wealth from her grandfather’s luxury department store. “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity,” Arbus herself once said. She sought out people with unusual stories, and titled them as such: Mexican Dwarf in his Hotel Room, N.Y.C 1970, and A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents, in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970. Even in her portraits of people who were not marginalized, such as her widely known picture of twin girls, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. (1966), she emphasized their strangeness.

So was Arbus’s work the case of a privileged photographer who was othering her subjects? Six years after Arbus died by suicide, it’s possible Sontag did not have the full picture of the photographer’s intent. This was largely because Doon Arbus was meticulous with her mother’s estate after Arbus died; she was exceedingly careful about where the images appeared and what was written about the photographer. (Unsurprising, considering that even in 2011, critic Sean O’Hagan reduced Arbus’s vigorous personality to a woman who was “troubled,” with a “fragile state of mind,” her whole life eclipsed by her suicide in the very first sentence.)

It wasn’t until a 2003 retrospective of Arbus’s work that many of her images, letters, and journal entries were made public. They clarified that she was empathetic, not voyeuristic, a word that continues to trail her legacy. In 2005, The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl argued that “imputations of ‘voyeurism’ are absurd; voyeurs must feel safe, and Arbus’s pictures are like the gaping barrels of loaded guns.”

Though there is always a power hierarchy between photographer and subject—a photographer is seeking honesty and vulnerability when the camera is raised—there is a difference between a photographer who takes the shot and leaves, and one who stays. Arbus was one to stay, giving her time and respect, and building a rapport with the people she photographed. She met Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant, a decade before she snapped the now-famous image of him and his parents; she was invited to celebrate the birthday of a prostitute whom she photographed in bed, in front of a cake. And, late in her life, she returned to the residences of “Untitled” again and again, taking portraits that suggested friendship and closeness between her and her subjects.