Moved and disturbed

In 1960, writing a postcard to her friend and mentor Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus (1923–71) worried that she was ghoulish. From an early age her photographs had recorded the marginalised and dispossessed, capturing the imperfections and frailties of humanity. She was a woman with a mission — scrutinising society and chronicling the damaged or eccentric, what she called ‘singular people’. She made square-format photographs of a startling clarity, but, despite her technical brilliance, her vision was dark and bleak. It comes as no surprise to learn that she suffered acutely from the devils of depression and that she committed suicide. The great empathy which informs her image-making in the end got too much for her. But before it destroyed her, it enabled her to produce a remarkable body of work which continues to move and disturb us.

Viewing an Arbus exhibition is not an unrelievedly joyous experience. It can be harrowing, especially when there are a couple of hundred images on display and many of them project a mood which is oppressive to the spirit. This is the largest Arbus retrospective yet assembled — many of the photos have not been publicly exhibited before — and it takes fortitude to give it the level of attention it deserves. The show opens with a bang: an anteroom of familiar top-quality Arbus images, such as the boy in curlers and a young Brooklyn family in their Sunday best. It’s 1966, it’s New York, and Diane Arbus is simply telling things as they are. After all, she’s celebrated for documenting what was happening, for a kind of ‘contemporary anthropology’, yet it takes a certain taste for the odd and grotesque to find oneself almost exclusively in their company.

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The exhibition then backtracks to her earliest photos, such as the fire-eater at a carnival of 1956, and an even earlier interior with lamp and light fixture that the late lamented Patrick Caulfield would have relished.