Known for unflinching photographs of communities on the margins—from carnival freaks to nudist colonies—Diane Arbus changed the perception of what photography could be.
With each passing year since Arbus’s 1971 suicide, her influence and status have grown in ways unimaginable to her during her lifetime. Her most famous photographs—the New Jersey identical twins in matching dresses whose unsettling gaze into the lens of Arbus’s Rolleiflex camera is said to have inspired a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; the “Jewish giant” who looms over his parents in the family’s Bronx apartment, illuminated by Arbus’s flash—are now so much part of the fabric of fine art it is hardly controversial to suggest, as a recent New York magazine headline did, that Arbus was the “most radical photographer of the 20th century.”
