.cataclysm. The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

Best known for her disconcerting images exploring the intricate nature of what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singular figure in American postwar art. Her bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach.

In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though admired and respected by an expanding coterie of photographers and artists, Arbus was not widely known at the time of her death.

When the exhibition opened, on November 7, 1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most-attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines of visitors regularly stretching down the block. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion.”

Naturally, as in the case of the 1972 show, the current exhibition includes all the images Arbus selected for A box of ten photographs, her only portfolio, which she began work on in 1969, two years before her death. She completed the printing of eight sets of a planned edition of fifty, but despite her exhaustive efforts, only managed to sell four during her lifetime. These were acquired by Richard Avedon, Mike Nichols, art director Bea Feitler, and Jasper Johns. As Arbus wrote to her former husband, Allan, “the owners are out of Who’s Who. My confidence is absurdly on a roller coaster.”

In retrospect, the art world’s embrace of photography can be seen to have begun with Diane Arbus and these two events. Further, it was the immense and enduring critical and popular response to the 1972 retrospective and the simultaneous publication of the Aperture monograph Diane Arbus that secured photography’s legitimacy. As Hilton Als wrote, “An artistic breakthrough of this magnitude…almost always results in work that has cataclysmic significance for the audience.”

So much has changed since the 1972 show that, as is often the case with pivotal historical events, it is now almost impossible to conceive that the current status of photography as art was ever otherwise.

The nature of Arbus’s achievement is such that her work stands alone—isolated even from her chosen medium—as radical and inexplicable today as when it first appeared.

What seems to have enthralled some and enraged others about Arbus’s work is how she unflinchingly illuminated the singularity of each of her subjects, which—paradoxically—linked them to one another and, by extension, to the viewer.