Editing Diane Arbus (section)

==Critical reception==
* In a 1967 review of MoMA's ''New Documents'' exhibition, which featured the work of Diane Arbus, [[Lee Friedlander]], and [[Garry Winogrand]], [[Max Kozloff]] wrote, "What these photographers have in common is a complete loss of faith in the mass media as vehicle, or even market for their work. Newsiness, from the journalistic point of view, and 'stories', from the literary one, in any event, do not interest them....Arbus' refusal to be compassionate, her revulsion against moral judgment, lends her work an extraordinary ethical conviction."<ref>[[Max Kozloff|Kozloff, Max]]. "Photography". ''The Nation'', vol. 204, pp. 571–573, May 1, 1967.</ref>
* Writing for ''[[Arts Magazine]]'', Marion Magid stated, "Because of its emphasis on the hidden and the eccentric, this exhibit has, first of all, the perpetual, if criminal, allure of a sideshow. One begins by simply craving to look at the forbidden things one has been told all one's life not to stare at... One does not look at such subjects with impunity, as anyone knows who has ever stared at the sleeping face of a familiar person, and discovered its strangeness. Once having looked and not looked away, we are implicated. When we have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator, a transaction takes place between the photograph and the viewer; in a kind of healing process, we are cured of our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for looking. In the end, the great humanity of Diane Arbus' art is to sanctify that privacy which she seems at first to have violated."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Magid |first1=Marion |title=Diane Arbus in New Documents |journal=Arts Magazine |date=April 1, 1967 |page=54}}</ref><ref name=Ault2018/>
* [[Robert Hughes (critic)|Robert Hughes]] in a ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'' magazine review of the 1972 Diane Arbus retrospective at MoMA wrote, "Arbus did what hardly seemed possible for a still photographer. She altered our experience of the face."<ref name=Hughes/>
* In his review of the 1972 retrospective, [[Hilton Kramer]] stated that Arbus was "one of those figures—as rare in the annals of photography as in the history of any other medium—who suddenly, by a daring leap into a territory formerly regarded as forbidden, altered the terms of the art she practiced....she completely wins us over, not only to her pictures but to her people, because she has clearly come to feel something like love for them herself. "<ref>Kramer, Hilton. "From fashion to freaks". ''The New York Times'', November 5, 1972.</ref>
* [[Susan Sontag]] wrote an essay in 1973 entitled "Freak Show" that was critical of Arbus' work; it was reprinted in her 1977 book ''[[On Photography]]'' as "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly".<ref name=Rubinfien2005/> Among other criticisms, Sontag opposed the lack of beauty in Arbus' work and its failure to make the viewer feel compassionate about Arbus's subjects.<ref name=Parsons>Parsons, Sarah. "Sontag's Lament: Emotion, Ethics, and Photography". ''Photography & Culture'', vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 289–302, November 2009.</ref> Sontag's essay itself has been criticized as "an exercise in aesthetic insensibility" and "exemplary for its shallowness".<ref name=Rubinfien2005/><ref name=Schjeldahl/> Sontag has also stated that "the subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista), everybody is the same."<ref name=Kimmelman2004 />  A 2009 article noted that Arbus had photographed Sontag and her son in 1965, causing one to "wonder if Sontag felt this was an unfair portrait".<ref name=Parsons/> Philip Charrier argues in a 2012 article that despite its narrowness and widely discussed faults, Sontag's critique continues to inform much of the scholarship and criticism of Arbus's oeuvre. The article proposes overcoming this tradition by asking new questions, and by shifting the focus away from matters of biography, ethics, and Arbus's suicide.<ref name=Charrier2012/>
* In [[Susan Sontag]]'s essay "Freak Show", she writes, "The authority of Arbus's photographs comes from the contrast between their lacerating subject matter and their calm, matteroffact attentiveness. This quality of attention—the attention paid by the photographer, the attention paid by the subject to the act of being photographed—creates the moral theater of Arbus's straight on, contemplative portraits. Far from spying on freaks and pariahs, catching them unawares, the photographer has gotten to know them, reassured them—so that they pose for her as calmly and stiffly as any Victorian notable sat for a studio portrait by Nadar or Julia Margaret Cameron. A large part of the mystery of Arbus's photographs lies in what they suggest about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed. Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don't."<ref>{{cite magazine|last=Sontag|first=Susan|author-link=Susan Sontag|title=Freak Show |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/11/15/freak-show/ |access-date=November 19, 2018 |magazine=[[The New York Review of Books]]|date=November 15, 1973}}</ref>
* [[Judith Goldman]] in 1974 posited that, "Arbus' camera reflected her own desperateness in the same way that the observer looks at the picture and then back at himself."<ref name=Goldman>Goldman, Judith.
"Diane Arbus: The Gap Between Intention and Effect". ''Art Journal'', vol. 34, issue 1, pp. 30–35, Fall 1974.</ref>
* [[David Pagel]]'s 1992 review of the ''Untitled'' series states, "These rarely seen photographs are some of the most hauntingly compassionate images made with a camera....The range of expressions Arbus has captured is remarkable in its startling shifts from carefree glee to utter trepidation, ecstatic self-abandonment to shy withdrawal, and simple boredom to neighborly love. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her photographs is the way they combine sentiments we all share with experiences we can imagine but never know."<ref name=Pagel/>
* In reviewing ''Diane Arbus: Untitled'' for ''[[Artforum]]'', [[Nan Goldin]] said, "She was able to let things be, as they are, rather than seeking to transform them. The quality that defines her work, and separates it from almost all other photography, is her ability to empathize, on a level far beyond language. Arbus could travel, in the mythic sense. Perhaps out of the desire not to be herself, she tried on the skins of others and took us along for the trip. Arbus was obsessed with people who manifested trauma, maybe because her own crisis was so internalized. She was able to look full in the faces we normally avert our eyes from, and to show beauty there as well as pain. Her work is often difficult but it isn't cruel. She undertook that greatest act of courage—to face the terror of darkness and remain articulate."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Goldin |first1=Nan |title=Untitled—Diane Arbus |journal=Artforum |date=November 1995}}</ref>
* [[Hilton Als]] reviewed ''Untitled'' in 1995 for ''[[The New Yorker]]'', saying, "The extraordinary power of ''Untitled'' confirms our earliest impression of Arbus's work; namely, that it is as iconographic as it gets in any medium."<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Als |first1=Hilton |title=Unmasked A different kind of collection from Diane Arbus |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/11/27/unmasked-books-hilton-als |access-date=November 16, 2018 |magazine=The New Yorker |date=November 27, 1995}}</ref>
* In her review of the traveling exhibition ''Diane Arbus Revelations'', [[Francine Prose]] writes, "Even as we grow more restive with conventional religion, with the intolerance and even brutality it so frequently exacts in trade for meaning and consolation, Arbus's work can seem like the bible of a faith to which one can almost imagine subscribing—the temple of the individual and irreducible human soul, the church of obsessive fascination and compassion for those fellow mortals whom, on the basis of mere surface impressions, we thoughtlessly misidentify as the wretched of the earth."<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Prose |first1=Francine |title=Revisiting the Icons: The intimate photography of Diane Arbus |url=https://fraenkelgallery.com/press/revisiting-the-icons |access-date=November 16, 2018 |magazine=Harper's Magazine |date=November 2003}}</ref>
* Barbara O'Brien in a 2004 review of the exhibition ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums'' found her and [[August Sander]]'s work "filled with life and energy."<ref>O'Brien, Barbara. "Learning to Read: the Epic Narratives of Diane Arbus and August Sander". ''Art New England'', vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 22–23, 67, October–November 2004.</ref>
* [[Peter Schjeldahl]], in a 2005 review of the exhibition ''Diane Arbus Revelations'' for ''[[The New Yorker]]'' stated, "She turned picture-making inside out. She didn't gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates....You may feel, crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before. Nor is this impression of novelty evanescent. Over the years, Arbuses that I once found devastating have seemed to wait for me to change just a little, then to devastate me all over again. No other photographer has been more controversial. Her greatness, a fact of experience, remains imperfectly understood."<ref name=Schjeldahl/>
* [[Michael Kimmelman]] wrote in 2005, "If the proper word isn't spirituality then it's grace. Arbus touches her favorite subjects with grace. It's in the spread-arm pose of the sword swallower, in the tattooed human pincushion, like [[Saint Sebastian|St. Sebastian]], and in the virginal waitress at the [[nudist camp]], with her apron and order pad and her nicked shin. And it's famously in the naked couple in the woods, like [[Adam and Eve]] after [[Fall of man|the Fall]]."<ref name=Kimmelman2005/>
* [[Ken Johnson (art critic)|Ken Johnson]], reviewing a show of Arbus's lesser-known works in 2005, wrote, "Arbus's perfectly composed, usually centered images have a way of arousing an almost painfully urgent curiosity. Who is the boy in the suit and tie and fedora who looks up from the magazine in a neighborhood store and fixes us with a gaze of unfathomable seriousness? What is the story with the funny, birdlike lady with the odd, floppy knit hat perched on her head? What is the bulky dark man in the suit and hat saying to the thin, well-dressed older woman with the pinched, masklike face as he jabs the air with a finger while they walk in Central Park? Arbus was a wonderful formalist and just as wonderful a storyteller—the [[Flannery O'Connor]] of photography.<ref name=Johnson>[[Ken Johnson (art critic)|Johnson, Ken]]. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E6DA1330F933A0575AC0A9639C8B63 "Art in Review; Diane Arbus"]. ''[[The New York Times]]'', September 30, 2005. Retrieved February 14, 2010.</ref>
* [[Leo Rubinfien]] wrote in 2005, "No photographer makes viewers feel more strongly that they are being directly addressed....When her work is at its most august, Arbus sees through her subject's pretensions, her subject sees that she sees, and an intricate parley occurs around what the subject wants to show and wants to conceal....She loved conundrum, contradiction, riddle, and this, as much as the pain in her work, puts it near [[Franz Kafka|Kafka]]'s and [[Samuel Beckett|Beckett]]'s....I doubt anyone in the modern arts, not Kafka, not Beckett, has strung such a long, delicate thread between laughter and tears."<ref name=Rubinfien2005/>
* In [[Stephanie Zacharek]]'s 2006 review of the movie ''[[Fur (film)|Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus]]'', she writes, "When I look at her pictures, I see not a gift for capturing whatever life is there, but a desire to confirm her suspicions about humanity's dullness, stupidity, and ugliness."<ref name=Zacharek/>
* [[Wayne Koestenbaum]] asked in 2007 whether Arbus's photographs humiliate the subjects or the viewers.<ref>Koestenbaum, Wayne. "Diane Arbus and Humiliation". ''Studies in Gender & Sexuality'', vol. 8, issue 4, pp. 345–347, Fall 2007.</ref> In a 2013 interview for the ''[[Los Angeles Review of Books]]'' he also said, "She's finding little pockets of jubilation that are framed within each photograph. The obvious meaning of the photograph is abjection, but the obtuse meaning is jubilation, beauty, staunchness, pattern."<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Koestenbaum |first1=Wayne |title=Dirty Mind: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum |url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dirty-mind-an-interview-with-wayne-koestenbaum/#! |access-date=November 16, 2018 |magazine=Los Angeles Review of Books |date=December 2, 2013}}</ref>
* [[Mark Feeney]]'s 2016 ''[[The Boston Globe]]'' review of ''in the beginning'' at the [[Met Breuer]] states, "It's not so much that Arbus changed how we see the world as how we allow ourselves to see it. Underbelly and id are no less part of society for being less visible. Outcasts and outsiders become their own norm – and with Arbus as ambassador, ours, too. She witnesses without ever judging."<ref>{{cite news |last=Feeney|first=Mark|author-link=Mark Feeney|title=Met Breuer exhibit shows Diane Arbus emerging |url=https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/07/21/met-breuer-exhibit-shows-diane-arbus-emerging/A1NPu4dU7Byz53S53u1arI/story.html |newspaper=[[The Boston Globe]]|date=July 21, 2016}}</ref>
* In a 2018 review for ''[[The New York Times]]'' on Diane Arbus's ''Untitled'' series, [[Arthur Lubow]] writes, "The 'Untitled' photographs evoke paintings by [[James Ensor|Ensor]], [[Pieter Bruegel the Elder|Bruegel]] and especially the covens and rituals conjured up by [[Francisco Goya|Goya]]...In the almost half century that has elapsed since Arbus made the 'Untitled' pictures, photographers have increasingly adopted a practice of constructing the scenes they shoot and altering the pictures with digital technology in an effort to bring to light the visions in their heads. The 'Untitled' series, one of the towering achievements of American art, reminds us that nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality if a photographer knows where to look. And how to look."<ref name=Lubow2018/>
* Adam Lehrer wrote, in his ''[[Forbes]]'' review of ''Untitled'', Arbus calls attention to vibrant expressions of joy while never letting us forget life's eternal anguish. Some critics have suggested that Arbus sees herself in her subjects. But perhaps that's only partially true. It's probably a more factual assertion to claim that Arbus sees all of us in her subjects....Arbus's only delusion was believing, or hoping, that others would share her peculiar fixations. But to say that her work is merely about human imperfection is both accurate and laughably dismissive. Arbus surely was focused on human imperfection, but within imperfection, she found unvarnished, perfect humanity. And humanity, to Arbus, was beautiful."<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Lehrer |first1=Adam |title=Diane Arbus 'Untitled' Works Inaugurate David Zwirner's Status as Co-Reps of Artist's Estate |url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamlehrer/2018/11/06/diane-arbus-untitled-works-inaugurate-david-zwirners-status-as-co-reps-of-artists-estate/#1139bc967d2d |magazine=Forbes |date=November 6, 2018}}</ref>

Some of Arbus's subjects and their relatives have commented on their experience being photographed by Diane Arbus:
* The father of the twins pictured in "Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967" said, "We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen. I mean it resembles them, but we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this."<ref name=Segal/>
* Writer [[Germaine Greer]], who was the subject of an Arbus photograph in 1971, criticized it as an "undeniably bad picture" and Arbus's work in general as unoriginal and focusing on "mere human imperfection and self-delusion."<ref>[[Germaine Greer|Greer, Germaine]]. [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography "Wrestling with Diane Arbus"]. ''[[The Guardian]]'', October 8, 2005. Retrieved February 3, 2010.</ref>
* [[Norman Mailer]] said, in 1971, "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."<ref name=Muir/><ref name=Armstrong>Armstrong, Carol. "Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus". ''October'', vol. 66, pp 28–54, Autumn 1993.</ref> Mailer was reportedly displeased with the well-known "spread-legged" ''New York Times Book Review'' photo. Arbus photographed him in 1963.<ref name="Armstrong"/><ref>[[Mark Feeney|Feeney, Mark]]. "She Opened Our Eyes Photographer Diane Arbus Presented a New Way of Seeing." ''Boston Globe''. November 2, 2003, ProQuest. March 2, 2017</ref>
* Colin Wood, the subject of ''Child With a Toy Grenade in Central Park'', said, "She saw in me the frustration, the anger at my surroundings, the kid wanting to explode but can't because he's constrained by his background."<ref name="guardian-ohagan-2">{{cite news | url = https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/diane-arbus-portrait-of-a-photographer-review-arthur-lubow | date = October 25, 2016 | access-date = August 9, 2017 | first = Sean | last = O'Hagan | author-link = Sean O'Hagan (journalist) | newspaper = [[The Guardian]] | title = Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer review – a disturbing study}}</ref>