Diane Arbus photographed people most others looked past. Sideshow performers, twins, nudists, transvestites, people on park benches and in living rooms. She approached them directly, asked if she could make their portrait, and stayed long enough to capture something that felt less like a photograph and more like an encounter. "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them," she once said. That belief drove twenty years of work that redefined what portrait photography could be.
A Privileged Start
Born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, she grew up in a wealthy Jewish family on Central Park West. Her father, David Nemerov, ran Russeks, a Fifth Avenue fur and fashion store. Her older brother Howard would become a celebrated poet and U.S. Poet Laureate. The family could afford the best schools, private art instruction, and every material comfort. Arbus later described feeling insulated by that wealth in ways that made the raw edges of the world all the more fascinating to her.
At fourteen she fell in love with Allan Arbus, then nineteen. They married in 1941, when she was eighteen. Allan had learned photography in the Army, and their shared interest in the medium led them into business together.
Twenty Years in Fashion
The couple launched "Diane & Allan Arbus," a fashion photography studio that ran for two decades. Allan operated the camera. Diane directed everything else: styling, wardrobe, hair, makeup, poses. Their client list included Glamour, Seventeen, and Vogue. Their first published work appeared in Glamour in May 1947.
Both of them hated the fashion world. The work was technically competent and commercially successful, but it left Diane restless. She was the one with the eye for composition and mood, yet she stood behind the scenes rather than behind the camera. By 1957 the partnership dissolved. Allan continued with studio work and eventually moved into acting. Diane was finally free to find her own subjects.
Lisette Model and the Turn
The pivot came through a teacher. In 1956 Arbus enrolled in a class with Austrian-born photographer Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research. Model's approach was blunt and instinctive. She told students to photograph what they found compelling, without apology. For Arbus, the effect was immediate. "Until I studied with Lisette, I'd gone on dreaming photography rather than doing it," she recalled.
Model recognized something specific in Arbus. She later observed that her student "was determined to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on." Rather than steer Arbus toward safer territory, Model pushed her deeper into the subjects that already drew her: people on the margins, people whose appearance made others uncomfortable, people whose lives played out in public spaces that most photographers walked past.
By 1959 Arbus had separated from Allan, moved to Greenwich Village, and committed herself entirely to street photography. She carried a 35mm Nikon through New York, shooting grainy, rectangular frames of the people she encountered.
Cameras, Flash, and the Search for Clarity
The grainy 35mm period did not last long. Arbus wanted more. "In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things," she said. "But when I'd been working for a while with all these dots, I suddenly wanted terribly to get through there. I wanted to see the real differences between things."
Around 1962 she switched to a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex, a medium-format camera that produced sharp, square negatives. The waist-level viewfinder changed her relationship with subjects. Instead of holding a camera to her face and creating a barrier, she could look down into the viewing prism while talking, maintaining something closer to a normal interaction. She could observe without staring directly.
By 1964 she had moved to a Mamiya C33, another twin-lens reflex but with interchangeable lenses. She attached a large flash unit and began using it in daylight, a technique that became her signature. The flash isolated her subjects from their backgrounds, created an unnatural frontal light that revealed every pore and crease, and produced a slightly surreal quality that made even ordinary settings feel charged. She used the flash without any diffusion, embracing the harshness rather than softening it.
This combination of medium-format sharpness and direct flash gave her images their unmistakable look: intimate, confrontational, and almost uncomfortably detailed.
The People She Found
Arbus spent time in places that most New Yorkers avoided. She frequented Hubert's Museum, a Times Square dime museum and sideshow that operated from the mid-1920s until 1965. She photographed sword swallowers, contortionists, and performers. She visited nudist camps, carnival grounds, and body-building competitions. She sought out transvestites, twins, people with dwarfism, and families whose domestic lives carried an undercurrent of tension.
She also photographed people with no obvious strangeness at all: a boy in Central Park clutching a toy grenade, a couple on a park bench, a woman in a bathrobe. The power of those images came from the same directness she brought to the sideshow portraits. Everyone was given the same unflinching attention.
Her relationship with her subjects was not voyeuristic. She spent time with them, sometimes returning again and again before making a picture. She treated the encounter as a two-way exchange. "A photograph is a secret about a secret," she said. "The more it tells you the less you know."
The portraits that most people know by name came from this period. Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park (1962) captured a boy named Colin Wood mid-tantrum, his face twisted with exasperation. Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967) depicted seven-year-old girls standing side by side, one smiling, one not, an image that later influenced Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx (1970) showed Eddie Carmel towering over his much shorter parents in their small apartment.
New Documents and Recognition
In 1963 Arbus received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project she titled "American Rites, Manners and Customs." A second fellowship followed in 1966. These grants gave her the financial freedom to pursue work that had no obvious commercial outlet.
The critical turning point came on February 28, 1967, when the Museum of Modern Art opened "New Documents," an exhibition curated by John Szarkowski that featured Arbus alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Thirty-two of Arbus's photographs hung in the show, which drew nearly 250,000 visitors. Szarkowski wrote that the three photographers had "redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends." The exhibition was polarizing. Some critics called Arbus a disinterested voyeur. Others praised her evident empathy.
By 1970 Arbus had assembled "A Box of Ten Photographs," a portfolio of what she considered her strongest images. It was the only portfolio she produced during her lifetime.
The Darkroom and the Print
Arbus cared deeply about her prints. She worked on Portriga paper and developed a distinctive approach to edges: rather than printing with a standard black border, she dampened the edges of the paper with saliva and used small pieces of cardboard to create soft, slightly irregular borders. The effect was subtle but deliberate, giving each print a handmade quality that distinguished it from the crisp geometry of conventional darkroom work.
She avoided dodging and burning. Instead, she arrived at densities and contrast levels that she felt were, in her words, "philosophically right" for each image. The printing decisions were inseparable from the picture's meaning. After her death, master printer Neil Selkirk took over the production of her prints, carefully replicating her techniques to maintain the integrity of the work.
Legacy
Arbus died on July 26, 1971. She was forty-eight. She had suffered from bouts of depression for years, and her death was a suicide.
The following year, MoMA mounted a posthumous retrospective organized by Szarkowski. It drew the highest attendance of any exhibition in the museum's history to that point. Simultaneously, Aperture published Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, featuring eighty photographs selected by Marvin Israel and Arbus's daughter Doon. The book sold over 100,000 copies and has been reprinted numerous times.
In 2007 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the complete Arbus estate archive: hundreds of photographs, negatives from 7,500 rolls of film, contact prints, notebooks, and correspondence. Additional books followed over the decades, including Diane Arbus Revelations (2003) and In the Beginning (2016), each revealing new dimensions of a practice that was far larger than the handful of iconic images most people recognize.
What Arbus left behind was not just a body of photographs but a way of seeing. She proved that the camera could function as an instrument of genuine human encounter rather than detached observation. "I work from awkwardness," she once said. "By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." That willingness to be changed by what she photographed, rather than simply recording it, is what makes her work last.
Explore More
For more photographers who brought unflinching honesty to their portraiture, see Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Arbus's approach to street encounters also connects to the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the broader history of street photography.