ABSTRACT
The late Diane Arbus, who died a suicide in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, 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. For what Diane Arbus brought to photography was an ambition to deal with the kind of experience that had long been the province of the fictional arts—the novel, painting, poetry, and films. The change of focus from the world of fashion to the world of freaks is a vast one, of course, by any obvious standard of social acceptability. The world of fashion, especially fashion photography, is a world of self-conscious artifice, of cosmetic and sartorial invention, a world untouched by the common flaws of existence, where standards of normality are under continuous revision and embellishment.
