In the eye of the beholder

From early on, photography developed the capacity to dedicate itself above all to those in the blind spot of most people’s perception. Few cities offer as many opportunities for this as the dynamic urban sprawl of New York. The photographs by Jacob August Riis are among the earliest examples of portraits of the “freaks” in this metropolis. The Danish photographer drifted through the slums and drinking holes from the late 1870s on behalf of various New York newspapers, taking photographs of the poorest of the poor, dawdlers, vagabonds and prostitutes – but always with the greatest empathy and driven by the desire to shed light on their situation. Several decades later, the charismatic photojournalist Arthur Fellig, called “Weegee”, portrayed colorful street life in the Big Apple, more drastically but with the same deeply-felt sympathy for the people on the margins of society.

Diane Arbus dealt with social exclusion in her photographic work, showing American society what it would rather not see. She records the personal history engraved in each person’s physiognomy with great intensity and an immediacy that is essentially unique in the history of photography. Arbus’s work captivates the viewer with both a sense of identification and dissociation.

Her subjects gaze directly into the camera, attesting to the rapport she builds up with her protagonists and pointing to their more or less conscious act of self-expression: Like the girl in her circus costume, or like in the portrait of Susan Sontag. The critic first wrote about Arbus' work in her essay “Freak Show”, which was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1973 and then later published her famous essay “On Photography” analyzing Diane Arbus’s visual language. 

Diane Arbus studied photography with Berenice Abbott, but the workshops she attended later on by the American photographer Lisette Model had the greatest impact on her career. Beginning in 1960, her portraits and photo essays were published in major magazines like Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented her work for the first time in 1965 in the exhibition “Recent Acquisitions: Photography", followed by the exhibition "New Documents" in 1967 and then honored her photographic oeuvre a year after her death with a comprehensive retrospective in 1972. The intensive examination of her work in the form of numerous exhibitions and academic research continues to this day.