The Brooklyn Rail

Comprised of more than 450 prints, Constellation offers a fresh perspective on the career of photographer Diane Arbus (b. 1923–1971), interspersing her most acclaimed images with works that have never been published before, and challenging the predominant conception of her as a chronicler of the socially marginalized. This collection, presented by collector Maja Hoffmann and the LUMA Foundation, was produced by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to create prints from Arbus’s negatives. According to Selkirk, who was once her student, Arbus was meticulous about how her images looked and produced relatively few in her lifetime, only printing a photograph when one was requested.

Immediately upon entering the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Park Avenue Armory, portraits surround the viewer like stars scattered across the sky. Curator Matthieu Humery devised an ingenious and poetic exhibition design, dispensing with interior walls and hanging photographs at varying heights on black metal scaffolding. The semi-transparent structure was inspired by the New York City subway map and creates multiple maze-like paths through the exhibition. The arrangement is an homage to Arbus’s movement throughout the city, propelled by her fascination with its residents. The only precedent for this unusual design that comes to mind is Edward Steichen’s groundbreaking The Family of Man exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, where Arbus’s work was featured, and enlarged images were suspended from wires and poles.

Constellation uses no chronological or thematic groupings and very few wall labels, allowing the viewer to approach each image just as Arbus encountered each of her subjects. The mirrored back wall of the gallery adds to this theatricality, making you aware of your presence in the space as well as the movements of other people from one work to another. Each photograph is identified with a number and visitors navigate with a fold out paper key, matching each work with its identifying information. This treasure hunt recreates the excitement of perusing an archive and forces slower viewing.

Near the entrance I stopped to admire Self-Portrait, pregnant, N.Y.C. (1945), an early articulation of Arbus’s forthright and transgressive style. In 1944, a few years after receiving her first camera as a birthday gift from her husband Allan Arbus, she began taking self-portraits to document her pregnancy. She photographed her reflection in her closet door mirror, wearing only a pair of cotton briefs. With one hand on her growing stomach while the other grasps the leg of the camera tripod, her pose suggests both vulnerability and strength.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Arbus built her career through a series of photo essays for Esquire, Glamour, Show, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Sunday Times Magazine which focused on niche subjects, such as body builders, circus performers, and cross dressers. These assignments produced some of her most acclaimed photographs, which countered negative perceptions of non-conformists with relatable views such as A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street (1966), which presents a man in a pose that evokes a housewife. In 1968 Arbus began photographing the residents in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and the following year visited institutions for the disabled in New Jersey. Untitled (6) (1970–71), captures a joyful moment between three young female residents with Down syndrome playing in a field. When Arbus’s frank depictions of the stigmatized were shown at her 1972–73 MoMA retrospective, it sparked a divisive critical response that drew massive crowds to the exhibition, gaining her notoriety as a photographer of cultural outsiders.

While Constellation includes many images of individuality, they are interspersed with Arbus’s poignant depictions of daily life in New York City, which record the cultural shifts that took place between 1950 and 1970. In a 1956 photograph, Woman carrying a child in Central Park, N.Y.C., a mother cradles her sleeping son in her arms. A modern Madonna, she appears both regal and beleaguered. In Couple arguing, Coney Island, N.Y. (1960), the amusement park is the backdrop to a contentious exchange between a screaming woman and an indifferent man, highlighting the fragile boundary between pleasure and misadventure. Another photograph taken in Central Park, A young man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park, N.Y.C (1971), features a couple dressed in semi-punk style, capturing the freedom of younger generations. Although these images record Arbus’s interest in women’s experiences, her ambition was to photograph everyone—children skipping rope, writers, artists, dancers, a boy reading a magazine.

Rather than documents from another era, Arbus’s photographs feel surprisingly relevant to the current moment. Her unidealized depictions offer a counterpoint to the constructed, aspirational images that define the age of Instagram. Instead of manipulating her photographs in the darkroom, Selkirk observed that what Arbus prized was that they “looked like pictures that people knew were the truth.” Her unflinching depictions, both inside and outside the mainstream, remind us of the inherent beauty in our own crazy, imperfect lives.