Diane Arbus’ tender last photographs rediscovered

When you think of Diane Arbus, it’s her unflinching portraits of glamourous New York drag queens and pro-Vietnam war protestors, not to mention her memorable depictions of figures such as the “Identical Twins” and the “Jewish Giant”, that first spring to mind. An ongoing exhibition, Diane Arbus: Untitled at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery, however, reveals an unfamiliar aspect to her oeuvre, created in her later life, between 1969 until her death in 1971

Moving away from her usual stomping ground of her native New York City, Diane Arbus headed to residences for the developmentally and intellectually disabled in Vineland, New Jersey, most notably the co-educational Woodbridge State school, to photograph the residents during the last two years of her life. The resulting 66 images, displayed together for the first time, are fascinating depictions of a microcosmic world that is, as the Gallery states, “possessed of its own rituals and codes of conduct”.

Imagining a collection of photographs of a residential centre may conjure bleak images of institutional buildings and traumatised patients – at least that was the sombre tone of Arbus’ friend Richard Avedon’s series taken at the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital in 1963. But ever the innovator, Arbus instead focused on moments of celebration in these unique and marginalised communities, photographing the residents enjoying themselves during holidays, such as Easter and Halloween, and away from the cold confines of hospital wards. Her collection becomes a nostalgic documentation of joyful, relatable individuals dressed up as fairies, clowns and Halloween ghouls, revelling in open air spaces, rather than as the subjects of pain and degradation in cheerless, austere hospitals.

“It’s the first time I’ve encountered a subject where the multiplicity is the thing. I mean I am not just looking for the BEST picture of them. I want to do lots,” Arbus wrote in a letter to her husband, Allan Arbus, continuing to say that she had “FINALLY [found] what [she’d] been searching for”. This celebration suggests that these unusual images could in fact be the most accurate depiction of what she always wanted to capture with her acute eye. While to take the residents of a developmental home as her subjects may be an uncomfortable focal point, Arbus responds with warm-hearted empathy.

Unfortunately, we’ll never know exactly how this collection should have been presented, as Arbus died in 1971, before she had fully edited or titled the pictures, leaving it to her eldest daughter Doon to curate the series we have today. But perhaps this only adds to their haunting appeal. Although Arbus has been criticised for her voyeuristic eye in the past, the photos on view here are surprisingly tender — Arbus lenses these people with sensitivity and care, even with a sprinkling of good-natured humour. She strives to present an alternative side to her subjects outside of their identities as patients and residents while at the same time emphasising their gleeful innocence. As with all of her work — but perhaps most of all in this series — Arbus is asking us to look, rather than to look away, to smile rather than to pity.

“Diane Arbus: Untitled” runs at David Zwirner Gallery, New York West 20th Street through 15 December 2018.