The wild, the weird and the wonderful: the extraordinary show capturing Diane Arbus’s unsettling genius
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
