Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was an American photographer whose square-format portraits transformed postwar photography. Working largely in New York, she photographed couples, children, performers, nudists, people with disabilities and figures outside conventional social categories, often using direct flash and frontal composition. Darwin selects Arbus for a portraiture built on sustained encounters with people rarely granted photographic attention, producing images where intimacy, discomfort and social conventions remain deliberately unresolved.
