street, in the workplace, in the park. While the
environmental setting often provides description
as to the sitter’s personality or life, it does not
distract from the matter at hand, namely the poign-
ancy or intensity of the interaction between Arbus
and her subject.
She admired and was influenced by the typolo-
gies of August Sander, whose assorted shop-
keepers, industrial workers, peasants, artists, as
well as social outcasts reflected archetypes the
photographer found within his own milieu—Ger-
many in the 1920s and 1930s. She shared with
Sander a breadth of iconography and a sympathy
with subjects presented without romanticism. Her
nearly archeological interest in social mores and
milieus is evidenced in her project proposal for a
1963 Guggenheim Grant. TitledAmerican Rites,
Manners and Customs, she sought to depict a
range of social ceremonies, including beauty
pageants, games and competitions, costumes, par-
ties, and the like. Arbus called these ceremonies
‘‘our symptoms and our moments. I want to save
them, for what is ceremonious and curious and
commonplace will be legendary’’ (Arbus quoted
in Diane Arbus Revelations 41). She won this
grant and received a second one from the Guggen-
heim in 1966. Arbus’s photography also bears the
influence of her teacher, Austrian-born Lisette
Model, who also photographed for Harper’s
Bazaar and whose expressive images monumen-
talize their human, often quirky, subjects.
In order to achieve sharper, less grainy images,
Arbus had abandoned the 35-mm format by 1963
for a wide-angle Rolleiflex and later a Mamiyaflex
camera, each of which produced 2-¼’’ square nega-
tives. A photographer held the 2-¼ cameras at
waist-level, looking down, which slowed down the
process of picture-making considerably. This for-
mat was in keeping with her prolonged portrait
sittings. In addition, the wide angle of her first
Rolleiflex created a slight warping of the contents
of the frame, lending a subtle skewing of the com-
position that enhanced the psychological effect of
the picture. As early as 1965 she began printing her
pictures with the irregular, black borders that
showed the entire, uncropped negative. These bor-
ders (also used in Richard Avedon’s portraits)
called attention to the fact that the image was con-
structed on a two-dimensional surface rather than
a window-like view to the subject. Typical of the
1960s documentary aesthetic, Arbus’s use of the
negative borders put stress upon the subjectivity
of the photographer and her vision. Arbus’s por-
traits search thesurfaceof people, their facades,
costumes, eccentricities, and her direct, frontal
compositions reflect this. However, penetrating
vision often points to a hidden psychology, or at
least the traces of the vulnerabilities that lie
beneath this surface.
Historians have noted the potency, and discom-
fort, associated with Arbus’s seemingly voyeuristic
iconography, especially in relation to the viewer.
Arbus was intently aware of the role she played in
relation to her subjects, including any responsibil-
ity she might have for or to them. Because she
recognized that the pictures were the result of an
often passionate, emotional investment in her sub-
jects, she was careful to temper this with aesthetic
deliberation and dispassion. This complex inter-
twining of roles—between photographer and sub-
ject, photographer and viewer, and subject and
viewer—reveals Arbus’s masterful understanding
of empathy moderated by critical distance (Phillips,
Diane Arbus Revelations59). The gravitas of her
work, in fact, lay in this acute, triangular relation-
ship linking photographer, subject, and viewer. It
represented a rather early understanding of image
theory that would later inform much of postmo-
dern photography.
In keeping with Arbus’s interest in subcultures,
in 1969 she began photographing at a home for the
mentally retarded in New Jersey. These images
remain mysterious glimpses into the photogra-
pher’s subjective mindset as well as beautifully
poignant representations that seem to waver on
the line between what is normal and abnormal.
Arbus’s care to show her subjects as individuals—
without exploitation or editorializing—was reflect-
ed in the seriousness of this personal project, for
which she had to seek extensive permissions. Most
of the photographs from this series were posthu-
mously printed and titled (asUntitledimages). In
her notebooks of the time she detailed the various
residents by name, often describing particular inter-
actions on a given day. The work was edited by her
daughter Doon Arbus and published in 1995
(Arbus,Untitled1995).
That same year she self-produced a limited edi-
tion portfolio of museum-quality prints titledA
Box of Ten Photographs(dated 1970). The prints
were displayed in a minimalist, elegant, clear box
that doubled as a framing device, designed by her
friend Marvin Israel. The collection of photo-
graphs—all of which related to the family—as
well as their presentation represented a conscious
statement about how she viewed herself as an artist
and her photography (Phillips,Diane Arbus Reve-
lations66). The portfolio included several images
fromNew Documentsand five that had been pub-
lished inArtforum, May 1971. She advertised theARBUS, DIANE