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Despairing and unforgettable: the bleak vision of a genius
The Guardian
|November 07, 2025
In 1971, at the age of 48, the American photographer Diane Arbus killed herself.
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:
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