Diane Arbus: humanist or voyeur?

Camera obscura ... Diane Arbus poses for a portrait in New York c 1968 Photograph:

 Roz Kelly/Getty Images

Diane Arbus killed herself, aged 48, on 26 July 1971. On the 40th anniversary of her death, it's worth reconsidering her artistic legacy. Her work remains problematic for many viewers because she transgressed the traditional boundaries of portraiture, making pictures of circus and sideshow 'freaks', many of whom she formed lasting friendships with.

Arbus may have felt an enormous empathy with the people she photographed, but she was not one of them, however much she identified with their outsider status. She had her own troubles, but they were of a different order. The work she left behind remains powerful not just because of its dark formal beauty or its stark vision, but because it asks questions of the viewer about the limits of looking, about the vicariousness and predatory nature of photography, and about our complicity in all of this.

When we look at an Arbus photograph, we cannot help feeling that we are intruders or voyeurs, even though her subjects are tied to a time and place that has all but vanished. A sense of complicity – hers and ours – lies at the very heart of her power. Her images hold us in their sway even when our better instincts tell us to look away. Perhaps her greatest gift is that she understood that conflict instinctively, and did more than anyone to exploit it artistically.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/26/diane-arbus-photography-sideshow

Arbus is remembered as a chronicler of freaks - because that's how she cast herself, and because her suicide casts a garish shadow back on what we presume, maybe too easily, was the freakishness of her inner life. And because it's still, all these years later, easier to contemplate who she was than it is to step behind her lens and contemplate the people she photographed. 

"Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot," she wrote. "It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." 

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/arbus.html

'A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know...'                            Diane Arbus

 'The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a scrutiny that we're not normally subjet to. I mean that we don't subject eachother to. We're nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us... I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed...'                         Diane Arbus

'(...) nothing is ever alike. The best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.'             Diane Arbus

' She was entranced by differences, the minutest variations. That from the beginning nothing, no two rooms, no two beds, no two bodies or any parts of them were ever the same. Finding those differences thrilled her, from the most glaring ones like a giant to the smallest ones that just barely make someone unique'

                                     - Marvin Israel, on his friend, Diane Arbus