From tipsy flappers to weary parents and circus performers, the great photographer captured life in all its raw beauty. Her biographer revels in the biggest show of Arbus work ever, combining rare, unseen and famous images
Diane Arbus was drawn to people who reminded her of important figures in her life, such as her flamboyant maternal grandmother or her lover Marvin Israel. More generally, she was fascinated to the point of obsession by the discrepancy between who we are and how we want to be seen – what she called “the gap between intention and effect”. Her list of favourite subjects includes female impersonators, lobby murals of sylvan scenes and dioramas of murderers. As the scrutiny of her camera disclosed, they were not quite what they first appeared to be.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, an exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, is the largest display of Arbus prints ever mounted. In 2011, Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss pharmaceutical heiress who founded Luma, purchased all 454 artist proofs made by Neil Selkirk, the sole person authorised to print Arbus negatives after her suicide in 1971. At the suggestion of Luma photography curator Matthieu Humery, Hoffman is displaying all the photos for the first time, to mark the centenary of Arbus’s birth.
