The New Yorker, review by Vince Aletti
2025
“Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory (through Aug. 17), includes more than four hundred and fifty famous, little-known, and unknown photographs from her brief career, cut short by suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight. Controversy dogged her posthumous shows and publications, and though it has mostly been replaced by a profound appreciation, Arbus isn’t easy to love. The work remains tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark. The curator Matthieu Humery’s installation turns the Armory into what looks like a construction site—a dense network of metal structures hung with framed pictures at every height and mirrors at strategic spots. The immediate effect is at once overwhelming and thrilling: an amusement-park ride you never want to get off, with an astonishing image at every turn.