The Guardian, review by Veronica Esposito
2025
Constellation, the enormous new show of photographer Diane Arbus’s life work, aims to present the artist as no one has seen her before. Embracing randomness, this exhibition of a full set of 454 master prints from Arbus’s only authorized printmaker, Neil Selkirk, tries its best to give audiences a completely unstructured presentation of the photos.
“I wanted to make sure that it was as mixed up as possible,” the show’s curator, Matthieu Humery, told me. “I didn’t want to make any specific connections between images. I tried to keep out any kind of narratives so that visitors create their own narratives. There is this magic madness.”
Constellation grew out of a 2011 acquisition made by the Luma Foundation of Arbus’s prints, many of them unpublished and rarely viewed. With prices for individual Arbus prints ranging into the six figures, it was a blockbuster, and expensive, deal – such an acquisition demanded a bold show.
While mulling the potential exhibition, Humery’s thoughts went to the Met’s major 2005 Arbus retrospective, Revelation, and he recognized that he didn’t want to work the same ground. “The question was how to present this group of images without doing a classic retrospective, since it had already happened,” he said. “I thought it would be great to show everything at once. I was in the New York subway, looking at the map of the subway, and I saw that grid and thought, ‘Maybe we could have this sort of grid and present all the images that way.’”