Diane Arbus’ Largest-Ever Retrospective Features Photographs of Society’s Celebrated and Marginalized Figures
With 454 images arranged with as little order as possible, viewers are encouraged to wander and make their own observations—much like Arbus did on the streets of New York
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The largest-ever exhibition of Diane Arbus’ photography is having its North American debut this summer in New York City, Arbus’ hometown and the setting of some of her most enduring and perplexing portraits of humans on the margins of society.
Assembling more than 450 prints created by Neil Selkirk, Arbus’ one-time student and the only person authorized to make prints from her negatives, “Diane Arbus: Constellation” is on view at the Park Avenue Armory until August 17, 2025.
“Assembling,” however, should not be mistaken for “arranging.” Part of the exhibition’s appeal is its indiscriminate layout of photographs on a grid-like network of metal scaffolds spread throughout the former 55,000-square-foot New York State National Guard drill hall.
Fun fact: Diane Arbus' photographic legacy
In 1972, Arbus became the first American photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale, the famous international art festival.All 454 images are “as mixed up as possible,” the show’s curator, Matthieu Humery, tells the Guardian’s Veronica Esposito. “I didn’t want to make any specific connections between images. I tried to keep out any kind of narratives so that visitors create their own narratives. There is this magic madness.”
That randomness is supposed to simulate Arbus’ most famous method of finding her subjects: wandering the kaleidoscopic streets of New York with a camera strapped around her neck. “Visitors are encouraged to meander through the installation and create their own encounters with the people and places that caught the artist’s eye,” Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Armory, says in a statement.
Unlike hanging portraits on walls, the scaffolding structure creates a three-dimensional space. Between photographs and metal beams, viewers inevitably gaze at each other. With a mirror on the back of each picture frame, even the viewer’s own reflection becomes part of the jumble of faces, the unruly mass of humanity that Arbus devoted herself to capturing.
Arbus was born as Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923 to Jewish immigrants from Soviet Russia and Poland. She and her husband, Allan Arbus, whom she married when she was 18, began joint photography careers shooting advertisements for her family’s department store.
During World War II, Allan shot photos for the Army Signal Corps in Burma, while Arbus stayed in New York. Self-Portrait Pregnant, N.Y.C., taken in 1945, is the earliest photograph on view at “Constellation.” It is an image of Arbus in a mirror, topless and pregnant with her daughter. With the boxy camera held at a jaunty angle, it was an early signal of her interest in more radical forms of human portraiture.
After the war, the Arbuses went into business together, contributing fashion photography to magazines like Glamour and Vogue. But she chafed at the staid profession and soon set out on her own.
Her most well-known photographs from this era show people pushing against the edges of conformity. A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, New York (1970) shows Eddie Carmel, the so-called “Jewish Giant,” towering over his parents and yet hunched to fit in their quaint living room. Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. (1963) finds a pair of youngsters whose faces, clothes and postures make them seem far older. And A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. (1966) offers a more inclusive vision of the post-war American nuclear family, one that could accommodate, rather than hide, an intellectually disabled son.
“She was amazingly consistent and non-judgmental in what she was doing,” Selkirk tells Artnet’s William Van Meter. He describes how Arbus would approach potential subjects on the street, openly using her camera to gain their approval and trust.
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As Selkirk explains, Arbus’ photography represented a radical departure from “the era of magazine photojournalism, where there was a presumption that if you showed enough awful things, the world would stop being awful.”
While Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans’ photographs of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl had a political bent to them, Arbus’ pictures seemed to insist on observation without judgement.
As John Szarkowski, the curator of a 1967 show of Arbus’ photographs alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it,” per the New Yorker’s Max Norman.
Arbus also captured the lives of society’s most celebrated, too, but in this exhibition photographs of figures like Mae West, Susan Sontag and James Brown are interspersed with the obscure, the marginalized, the extraordinary and the ordinary. Like a busy city street or a subway, anyone can brush shoulders with anyone else. The same goes for the open-concept exhibition design.
To that end, “Constellation” puts all of Arbus’ subjects together in a chaotic mix, with limited guidance and no chronology or interpretation offered to the viewer—perhaps how Arbus would have wanted her largest-ever retrospective.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus wrote in Artforum in 1971, just months before she died by suicide. “The more it tells you the less you know.”
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” is on view at the Park Avenue Armory through August 17, 2025.
