Despairing and unforgettable: the bleak vision of a genius

In 1971, at the age of 48, the American photographer Diane Arbus killed herself.

- Jonathan Jones

Someone should have seen the clues, for her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species. Here is a woman nursing her baby, a modern Madonna - except the woman’s limbs are as thin as an addict’s, her face wizened and the infant, dressed in baby clothes, is a monkey. It is a pitiable image of desperation, of someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. And the despair mirrors that of Arbus herself.

You may want to see her many images of gender-blurring positively. There’s a photograph called Transvestite at Her Birthday Party, NYC, 1969: she lies on her bed laughing, double-chinned and gap-toothed in a blond wig, in a shabby hotel room with balloons. But Arbus said how macabre and pathetic she found the occasion: