Outward Signs of Inner Mysteries

Eric Gudas on the work and afterlife of the misunderstood photographer Diane Arbus.

By Eric GudasJanuary 5, 2026

• Art & Architecture

THE BARE-CHESTED MAN emanates light. Even the gray-tipped stubble on his chin and sunken cheeks sparks into the dusk. Behind him, a gloomy sky bears down; over his right shoulder, three flags ripple atop a carnival tent, where the letters “E E,” half an “I,” and the smaller “r e” hint at “eerie.” His lined face, the cigarette-smoking skull inked on his bald scalp, the scythe-wielding figure bulging on his right cheek: all embody a memento mori. But he stands, adamant, in a power pose before the camera—the ritual stance of his profession—to display his muscled torso and upper arms that swarm with tattoos. Stars rise from a bird whose outspread wings echo the V of his plunging collarbones, while the dark patch of hair that bristles from his chest and narrows to a line forms another downward-plunging shape. A snake’s head, with rounded eye, coils around his rib cage, its length disappearing into the murk below him. But I return to his eyes, fixed on mine, their irises ablaze, each dark pupil dotted with a pinprick of light. Those eyes—below the deep fissure that parts his eyebrows, set in wrinkles inked by time—burn so hard that they almost sear a hole in the photographic paper.

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I encountered Diane Arbus’s Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970 during the Los Angeles run of Cataclysm at David Zwirner. Subtitled The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, the exhibition, jointly organized with the Fraenkel Gallery, restaged the moment when Arbus’s work collided with a mainstream audience. Cataclysm presented all 113 photos from Diane Arbus, the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective, which opened Election Day, 1972, nearly 17 months after Arbus’s death at age 48. Curated by the museum’s director of photography, John Szarkowski, the retrospective set an attendance record for a one-person exhibition at MoMA. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, published to accompany the retrospective, with reproductions of 80 photographs selected by Arbus’s friend and colleague Marvin Israel and her eldest daughter, Doon Arbus, sold out its first printing of 5,000 right away. (The book has since sold more than 400,000 copies.) Arbus was “already a legend and an influence at the time of her death,” critic Hilton Kramer informed New York Times readers two days before the retrospective opened, but to many, she was unknown. What drew more than 250,000 attendees out to MoMA over the next two months? 

Cataclysm offered conflicting answers. Visitors to Zwirner walked into a welter of clashing, juicy pull quotes, painted directly on the lobby walls. This installation embodied the “war of words” precipitated by the MoMA show, which, for a wildly popular event, got a great deal of negative press. Reviewers focused relentlessly, often vitriolically, on Arbus’s subjects, using some now-taboo terms: freaks, transvestites, nudists, mentally retarded people, dwarfs, losers, mad people, sexual deviants, monsters, border-line cases, mongoloids, the helpless and the obscure, malignant children. (Everyone seems to have missed the ubiquitous category of “white people.”) Competing categories and descriptors sought to capture Arbus the creator: ambition, audacity, exploitative, compassionate, breakthrough, master of the highfalutin creep-out, cheated, sanctify, sorcery, transcendent.

The sources of many of the wall quotes can be found in Diane Arbus Documents, edited by Max Rosenberg and published to accompany Cataclysm’s 2022 run at David Zwirner New York, which reproduces key responses to Arbus and her work from 1967 to the present. The volume shows how the scathing hot takes of 1972–73 remain deeply embedded in writing about Arbus. Some early reviews entwined vicious attacks on the photographer—no longer alive to defend herself—with sensationalist speculations about her motives. As recently as 2017, Colm Tóibín could speculate that she “was somehow exploiting [her] subjects for their shock value or to satisfy some mutilated and estranged part of herself.” By pathologizing Arbus, Tóibín and many others call her very artistry into question. In fact, her photos’ apparent artlessness accounts for their power to elicit visceral reactions—from disgust to adulation. Szarkowski best articulated the enduring mystery of Arbus’s work: “She was always an artist and she knew she was an artist. Her way of being an artist […] was to conceal that fact as fully as she could from us when we looked at the pictures.”

Visiting Cataclysm several times during its run, I felt the increasing urge to escape these quote-filled walls, to leave behind their hyperbole and recycled media contretemps and instead to look at the pictures, which hung without titles or dates in a wordless gallery space. Rather than shock value, it was her work’s arresting rawness, its point of contact with photography’s origins, that made the MoMA exhibition into a phenomenon—and cemented Arbus’s status as an enduring artist. If the sensationalism has, in part, diminished, her photos’ power to stage unsettling encounters with her subjects persists. Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C. 1965, for example, summons what Walter Benjamin, responding to David Octavius Hill’s daguerreotype Newhaven Fishwife (1843–47), called “an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in ‘art.’”

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Before attending Cataclysm, I’d only seen Arbus’s photos in the Aperture monograph and the Diane Arbus Revelations exhibition catalog. These books’ superb production value made me forget I was looking at reproductions. The gelatin silver prints, I discovered at Zwirner, emit a kind of sheen that exemplifies what Diana Emery Hulick calls Arbus’s “preoccupation with surface appearances, with the shininess of human hair, flesh, costumes and masks”—and, I would add, makeup, tinsel, jewelry, and sunglasses. Whatever inferences we make about the subjects of Arbus’s photographs begin with the surfaces they (the prints and the subjects) present to the world. “They have an aura,” a fellow viewer murmured one afternoon, gesturing to the photos. Of course, Benjamin would’ve disagreed. Except for the early daguerreotypes, he excluded all photographs from the category of unreproducible artworks charged with an “aura.” I will not argue with him, but the prints had a force. They radiated star power.

Cataclysm’s true stars were the 39 photographs printed by Arbus in her lifetime. (Neil Selkirk, the exclusive printer for the estate of Diane Arbus, had printed the rest.) They provided a tangible link to the MoMA exhibition, where they had been displayed with Szarkowski’s wall text: “Her photographs record the outward signs of inner mysteries.” At Zwirner, I was drawn to Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C. 1966 because of precisely this enigmatic quality. A woman’s face, glasses, coat, and hat fill the frame without any contextual clues, so to speak, to aid interpretation. In her notorious takedown of the retrospective, Susan Sontag characterized Arbus’s subjects as “ugly” and “wearing grotesque or unflattering clothes.” I didn’t see Woman in a rose hat as a study of miscreation, but the photo does call attention to its subject’s bulbous nose, aging skin, and exotropia, or misaligned eyes. This misorientation may have appealed to Arbus because her subject looks both at the camera and away from it.

Arbus printed Woman in a rose hat in 1966 or ’67, a key juncture in her development. “I wanted to see the difference between flesh and material,” she later reflected, “the densities of different kinds of things: air and water and shiny. So I gradually had to learn different techniques to make it come clear. I began to get terribly hyped on clarity.” These techniques included using shallow depth of field to produce different levels of focus within the image: the subject’s face, glasses, and part of her coat appear in super-sharp focus, while the very hat to which the title calls our attention recedes into nebulousness. Materials of various “densities” surround and enclose the subject’s heavily powdered flesh: her fur coat’s bristles, her spectacles’ sharp metal and glass, the riotous fabric of her hat’s roses.

Dark borders on three sides of the image highlight the photographic paper’s materiality. Around 1965, Arbus began filing down her enlarger’s negative carrier—a practice which, Selkirk notes, “allowed the entire image area to be printed. It also left an uneven band of clear film, which printed black, between the edge of the image and the white paper border of the print.” These borders aren’t a gimmick, but they give Arbus’s prints an instantly recognizable look, so much so, in fact, that I needed to see them on the prints themselves to discern how they function as both enclosures and thresholds. Each side of the image has its own distinct boundary demarcating it from the photographic paper: here—and here—and here—and here.

In Cataclysm, Szarkowski’s original arrangement of photos was reconfigured by Doon Arbus to emphasize juxtaposition. At Zwirner, A young girl at a nudist camp, Pa. 1965 hung to the left of Woman in a rose hat. Unlike most of Arbus’s nudist camp photos, which include home furnishings or some other accoutrement of civilization, even a stray item of clothing, A young girl presents a totally naked subject in a natural setting. To look from this photo over to Woman in a rose hat, one might think Youth and Age or Nature and Culture. In contrast to the untamed grass surrounding the nudist, the flowers on the hat and glasses in Woman in a rose hat are glaringly artificial. Within the latter photo, there is a discordance between the flowers—suggesting Youth—and the subject’s heavily powdered, wrinkled skin and pursed lips. When I first saw Woman in a rose hat, I thought of the “old lady” in a Flannery O’Connor story who sports “a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim.” In fact, old ladies in flamboyant hats thronged Cataclysm.

Arbus’s hat ladies stride right through the nature-culture dichotomy. If they were invisible to most of the world, she saw them. In a 1960 note to Israel, Arbus evoked New Yorkers on a spring day: “so absolute and immutable down to the last button feather tassel or stripe, all odd and splendid […] and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in.” The notion of being enclosed in one’s identity—a “shape” determined by birth but also expressed through the plumage of costume—sounds less like confinement than an experience shared by all people (“we”).

When you spend a long time looking at Arbus, you start to find her in unexpected places: for instance, in Goya’s Doña Francisca Vicenta Chollet y Caballero (1806), which I viewed at the Norton Simon Museum not long after Cataclysm closed. As first court painter to Charles IV of Spain, Goya produced official portraits. In this painting, however, something seems amiss, unsanctioned. Arbus’s photos taught me to look for discrepancies, incongruities—what she famously called “the gap between intention and effect.” Goya’s subject, the wife of the court treasurer, though clad in opulent finery, appears ambivalent or uncomfortable about sitting for her portrait. This equivocality registers in her posture, in the way she clutches her dog, and especially in her eyes, which look slightly away from the viewer, fixed on an indistinct point. “Her indirect, possibly self-conscious gaze hinders an assessment of her personality,” reads the Norton Simon wall text—a reminder of how, in figurative art, a subject’s gaze is supposed to reveal psychological interiority. Szarkowski used these terms to present Arbus’s work as universal, noting that “her true subject was no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed.”

I think Arbus’s “true subject,” in fact, actively evades elucidation. Judith Butler pinpoints how, in certain Arbus photos, “the camera seems oddly rebuffed […] and the figures present an obdurate surface, one that cannot be entered or known.” The lone female figure in Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. 1968 (the title dryly draws attention to the absence of artwork) wears a mask of frozen composure that resembles one of the Madame Tussaud waxworks Arbus would photograph in 1969. With closed eyes, the subject of A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968 likewise presents a mask to the world he has recently entered, while A house on a hill, Hollywood, Cal., 1963 depicts not a house but a mere facade, perhaps part of a film set, and calls the whole notion of interiority—on many levels—into question.

In Goya’s painting, the subject’s adornment presents a kind of “obdurate surface.” Arbus might have titled the painting Woman with shiny headdress. Goya’s brushwork calls our attention to the silvery folds and spangles of Doña Francisca’s dress, her earrings, her gloves, and especially her tiara. In these official portraits, Goya uses light, as Robert Hughes notes, to accentuate “the energy and glitter of symbolic decoration.” Arbus generated light with her handheld flash or strobe gun, which she used both outdoors and indoors. Szarkowski might have had her work in mind when he wrote that “the character of flashlight from the camera is profoundly artificial, intrusive, and minutely descriptive, and in the hands of a photographer who understands it, it produces pictures of startling graphic economy and force.” While her use of flash is the easiest element for other photographers to imitate, in Arbus’s photos, flash’s artificiality reminds us, in myriad ways, of the distinction between the physical print and the world that print represents.

Flashlight, she stated in 1971, “alters the light enormously and reveals things you don’t see.” In A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966, flash highlights the subject’s stubble and plucked eyebrows, while it also sharpens his makeup’s gleam—an effect that disquieted early reviewers. However, Arbus’s flash also enlarges the subject’s shadow and creates a pool of darkness to his right. Arbus associated this interplay of glare and gloom with the Hungarian-born photographer Brassaï: “He taught me […] that obscurity could be as thrilling as clarity.”

In outdoor settings, Arbus used flash almost imperceptibly to differentiate her subjects from their backgrounds. In her 1965 photographs of individuals and couples in Washington Square Park, white shirts soak up her strobe’s light, while dark shirts set off a contrast with her subjects’ skin tones. In A young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965, the Black male subject’s light shirt accentuates the contrast between his skin tone and that of his female companion, which registers as literally white. This photo debuted in MoMA’s 1967 New Documents exhibition, the same year the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Constitution. Arbus knows, and her subjects must also know, that this photograph’s existence transgresses powerful taboos against miscegenation. Arbus spoke of the power of “what you can’t see in a photograph,” and while the woman isn’t visibly pregnant, the title registers the unseen and most subversive presence: the couple’s unborn child.

In other photographs, Arbus’s obtrusive flash performs the very media sensationalism she avoids in A young man and his pregnant wife. The subjects of The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C. 1970 peer out through a bombardment of light. This intrusive use of flash elicits the male subject’s despondent glare: humiliated once by the costume, by the whole setup, he resists—in vain—the humiliation of being photographed as king. The King and Queen stands in ironic relation to the official portraits by Goya and other court painters. Both Goya and Arbus set their subjects’ finery against a blank, dark wall, but Arbus’s ersatz royals self-consciously, almost sheepishly, swelter beneath costume regalia as they stare, in mortified chagrin, into the flashgun’s pop.

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The gazes of Arbus’s subjects, whether direct or averted, occluded by masks or issuing what she called “a remorseless scrutiny” back at her, always register her presence. Between 1956 and 1961, she worked, for the most part, within the conventions of street photography. However, around 1960, her discovery of German photographer August Sander’s Faces of Our Time: Sixty Portraits of Twentieth-Century Germans (1929) helped spur her move toward a highly personal combination of documentary and portraiture. Sander’s portraits—Girl in Fairground Caravan (1926/1932) provides a vivid instance—dramatize the tension between his subjects’ individual identities and their status as representatives of various social classes, milieus, and professions. The tensions in Arbus’s photos, on the other hand, emerge largely from her interactions with each of her subjects. Sometime in 1962, she began using a 2 1/4 camera, first a Rolleiflex and later a Mamiyaflex, whose very bulkiness necessitated direct encounters. With her camera’s waist-level viewfinder, Arbus could frame and look at—and often converse with—her subjects as she photographed them. They looked into, or away from, her eyes, not a lens.

In Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, Arbus presents three gazes. I had to go back and check the title—no, she did not use the word “identical.” Nonetheless, like her other photos with “identical” (twins, raincoats) and “matching” (bathing suits) in their titles, Triplets exploits the phenomenon of identicalness to highlight difference. The photograph challenges us to discern each triplet’s individuality within the uniformity—the arrangement of beds, headboards, wallpaper, curtain, and particularly the girls themselves, who wear identical outfits. Although its titular setting may be an intimate space, this photograph’s staging conveys alienation.

Arbus’s formal choices serve, paradoxically, to facilitate what seems like firsthand personal contact with her subjects. When I stood face to face with Triplets, I didn’t immediately consider the photograph’s compositional elements. Instead, I saw the three girls. “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject,” wrote Benjamin about daguerreotypes, “the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject.” In Triplets, that “spark” is, as it were, multiplied across the subject’s faces—first in their sameness, then in their differences. A multitude of differences emerge in the various shapes of their faces, in the ways they touch (or don’t touch) each other, in the forbidding line of each one’s mouth, and especially in their three pairs of eyes.

And here is where those who write about Arbus’s photographs come to grief—that “tiny spark” evades the words with which we try to capture it. One writer provides a snappy reading of Triplets: “From left to right, their emotions read wise, happy, sad, their differences as blunt as a row of ancient theater masks.” I don’t know; they all look sad to me, each in her own way. In the little narrative I devise, these three have been grouped together before a camera on every holiday and birthday, posed in a line on the bed, locked in a group identity (“Oh, it’s the triplets!”). Confined within the photograph’s frame, each sister struggles to body forth some “spark” of singular identity—or labors to suppress it.

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Arbus herself gazes out from Saul Leiter’s 1970 portrait. In her West Village apartment, she sits before a collage-wall of photographs—her own and others’—and newspaper clippings. In the last 18 months of her life, she pulled hundreds of photographs by Weegee and other photojournalists from the Daily News archives, as she helped Szarkowski prepare an exhibition that considered newspaper photographs “on a visual and psychological level—as experience rather than information.” Nine days after the Arbus retrospective closed, From the Picture Press opened. By stripping news photos of their captions, the exhibition transformed the pictures into a kind of uncanny found art. Sarah Meister, who worked with Szarkowski at the beginning of her career, points out how his description of the exhibition recalls his writing about Arbus: “As images, the photographs are shockingly direct, and at the same time, mysteriously elliptical and fragmentary, reproducing the texture and flavor of experience without explaining its meaning.”

In the catalog, Szarkowski thanks “the late Diane Arbus” for her “eyes and understanding” as displayed in the “quality of the pictures reproduced here.” Arbus’s eye picked up discordances and cryptic dramas. From the Picture Press was organized into five categories, at least three of which Arbus had devised: “Ceremonies,” “Winners,” and “Losers.” In a photograph from the catalog’s Winners section, one woman claps while another—the winner?—gazes, apparently horror-struck, beyond the frame. This disquieting image reminds me of Arbus’s few photos—including Teenager with a baseball bat, N.Y.C. 1962 and Two female impersonators backstage, N.Y.C. 1960—where the subjects look at someone or something outside the borders.

On Cataclysm’s closing day, I lingered by these photos, and a few others, for the last time. In the main gallery, A castle in Disneyland, Cal. 1962 still withheld its secrets. Arbus could stare down the Happiest Place on Earth and divine its clarity and obscurity until it mirrored Brassaï’s nocturnal visions of Paris. On those gallery walls, which would soon be empty, Arbus’s photographs surrounded us on all sides—arresting, occult, acrid, unabashed, abiding.

When asked for a brief statement about photographs in 1971, she wrote: “They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”

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Featured image: Diane Arbus, Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.