Diane Arbus’s Darkroom Confidant Walks Us Through Her Haunting New Retrospective

Opening today is the American debut of “Constellation,” the largest exhibition to date of the revolutionary photographer Diane Arbus. This Park Avenue Armory presentation is especially poignant, as Arbus was a New York local and did much of her work here, sourcing her subjects from every stratum of the city’s society—many heretofore ignored by the mainstream. The exhibition offers new perspectives into Arbus’s universe of humanity.

Curated by Matthieu Humery, “Constellation” runs through August 17 and features more than 450 prints—many of which have never been published. The show debuted at France’s LUMA Arles in 2023 and arrives in the U.S. with its original immersive format intact. It’s like wandering a labyrinth filled with uncanny strangers. The other visitors can be seen perusing this spatial grid-like scaffolding, becoming faces in the crowd and part of the show. There is no order, no timeline, no narrative. Does life really have one? Arbus is known for her subject matter: a cosmogony of the unseen.

She specialized in turning her lens on those pushed to the fringes: circus performers, drag queens, nudists, and the institutionalized. But she also photographed celebrities—James Brown, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Sontag, and Mae West, who appears curled in bed with her pet monkey. There was no separation between the marginalized and the celebrated. Everyone received equal framing and equal empathy.

In the application for her 1966 Guggenheim award, Arbus wrote, “I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another… a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”

“Sometimes it would be someone that she would see on the street, and she’d just walk up to them and say, ‘I love your hat. May I take your picture?’” said Neil Selkirk, a former student and collaborator, at yesterday’s preview. “She used the camera as what she called a ‘passport.’ You can’t go up to someone and say, ‘Hey, I want to come home with you and see how you live.’ But you could say, ‘I wanna take your picture.’”

He continued, “She was incredibly smart. She was seductive because she was interested in you. I felt it myself as I watched her talking to other people. She wanted to know, and she was really interested. It’s just a huge compliment to have someone like that asking you interesting questions about yourself. They just totally accepted her instantly.”

Selkirk is the only person ever authorized by the Diane Arbus Estate (she died in 1971 by her own hand at age 48) to print from her negatives. In 2011, LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann acquired his complete set of printer’s proofs—which now comprise this sweeping and unconventional retrospective.

At the show, Selkirk paused before (1966), in which a mother with Cleopatra eyeliner and a bouffant hairstyle clutches a leopard-print coat and a baby, flanked by her nonplussed husband and a grimacing son crossing his eyes. “She saw her on the subway and loved the fact that she was obviously trying to look like Elizabeth Taylor,” Selkirk said. “She then made the appointment and went to the house and spent time with them.”

Arbus shot two images of Eddie Carmel, a sideshow performer with gigantism known as “The Jewish Giant” and “The World’s Biggest Cowboy,” in his living room with his parents, a decade apart.

She began her career in fashion, as part of a duo with her husband Allan Arbus, styling his shoots for magazines. “I think she found it absolutely unbearable,” Selkirk said. “They just were just artifice. Her whole thing was the opposite of artifice.”

“She was amazingly consistent and non-judgmental in what she was doing,” Selkirk said. “She emerged out of the era of magazine photojournalism, where there was a presumption that if you showed enough awful things, the world would stop being awful. There was a political intention behind the act of photographing. You were showing the world the way it is. And if the world needed to be improved, people would. That was obviously complete nonsense. The point of the 1967 ‘New Documents’ show at the Museum of Modern Art—with Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and Arbus—was that they were just observing the world. They weren’t judging it. They were amused by it, in different ways.”

The seminal MoMA show was Arbus’s first major institutional exhibition. “She just wanted to know what made humanity tick,” Selkirk said.

Arbus didn’t find it hard to develop subject matter. She kept meticulous notebooks of people she wanted to photograph. “She compiled lists and then started making phone calls,” Selkirk said. “She scrutinized the want ads in the newspapers to look for events where she might go because something interesting might happen.”

During her lifetime, Arbus’s images were shocking. The world still hasn’t fully caught up to her unflinching, empathetic gaze. There is a striking representation of queer people in the images. But Selkirk demurs that this was just a component of her broader vision.

“She was just as interested in people who fenced or people who did ballroom dancing,” he said. “She said, ‘There are these worlds, and the worlds have rules, and they have gatherings, and they do things together.’ It was this fascination with how people choose to hang together. It wasn’t an obsession with gay or trans people. It’s recognition that they all became—whatever it is they are—however they became it, they became it. And that’s who they are. It’s mutual respect across the board, and that’s all that matters.”

Selkirk’s own entry into Arbus’s orbit was circuitous. In 1968, he was working as one of Richard Avedon’s assistants. One day, the assignment took him to the London home of director John Huston to photograph his wife, Anjelica Huston, and her brother.

“We’re setting up in their living room—it was full of stuff he’d collected from all over the world: voodoo dolls, strange things,” Selkirk recalled. There was one framed image: (1965), which showed a trio sprawled in a field—part heartland, part wasteland—as a blurry silo loomed in the background. Their inscrutable gazes challenge the viewer.

“I was left alone for a couple of hours in this room with this picture,” Selkirk continued. “It drove me insane. I had no idea who’d taken it. I just wanted to run out screaming. I didn’t know I shared Earth with people  like that. This is what’s so weird about my being involved in it to this day. It’s the only work of art ever that has had that effect on me. I was devastated by what it was telling me or what it was showing me. I just couldn’t comprehend it. My life was different from that moment on.”

Later, he encountered the same image again—this time propped against a wall in the Dakota apartment of the photographer Hiro. “I said, ‘I’ve seen that photograph before.’ And he said, ‘It’s by a woman called Diane Arbus. You’ll probably meet her.’ A few weeks later, she showed up at the studio. I had first been stupefied by this photograph in a way that I’ve never been since. Now I walk past it every evening on my way to bed.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com