The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.
Avowedly interested only in photographing people who “looked
strange,” Arbus found plenty of material close to home. New
York, with its drag balls and welfare hotels, was rich with freaks.
There was also a carnival in Maryland, where Arbus found a
human pincushion, a hermaphrodite with a dog, a tattooed man,
and an albino sword-swallower; nudist camps in New Jersey and
in Pennsylvania; Disneyland and a Hollywood set, for their dead
or fake landscapes without people; and the unidentified mental
hospital where she took some of her last, and most disturbing,
photographs.  And there was always daily life, with its endless
supply of oddities—if one has the eye to see them. The camera
has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as
to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity,
chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.
“You see someone on the street,” Arbus wrote, “and essentially
what you notice about them is the flaw.” The insistent sameness
of Arbus’s work, however far she ranges from her prototypical
subjects, shows that her sensibility, armed with a camera, could
insinuate anguish, kinkiness, mental illness with any subject. Two
photographs are of crying babies; the babies look disturbed, crazy. 
Resembling or having something in common with someone else
is a recurrent source of the ominous, according to the
characteristic norms of Arbus’s dissociated way of seeing. It may
be two girls (not sisters) wearing identical raincoats whom Arbus
photographed together in Central Park; or the twins and triplets
who appear in several pictures. Many photographs point with
oppressive wonder to the fact that two people form a couple; and
every couple is an odd couple: straight or gay, black or white, in 
an old-age home or in a junior high. People looked eccentric
because they didn’t wear clothes, like nudists; or because they
did, like the waitress in the nudist camp who’s wearing an apron. Anybody Arbus photographed was a freak—a boy waiting to
march in a pro-war parade, wearing his straw boater and his
“Bomb Hanoi” button; the King and Queen of a Senior Citizens
Dance; a thirtyish suburban couple sprawled in their lawn chairs;
a widow sitting alone in her cluttered bedroom. In “A Jewish giant
at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970,” the parents
look like midgets, as wrong-sized as the enormous son hunched 
over them under their low living-room ceiling.
The authority of Arbus’s photographs derives from the contrast
between their lacerating subject matter and their calm,
matter-of-fact attentiveness. This quality of attention—the
attention paid by the photographer, the attention paid by the
subject to the act of being photographed—creates the moral
theater of Arbus’s straight-on, contemplative portraits. Far from
spying on freaks and pariahs, catching them unawares, the
photographer has gotten to know them, reassured them—so that
they posed for her as calmly and stiffly as any Victorian notable
sat for a studio portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron. A large part
of the mystery of Arbus’s photographs lies in what they suggest
about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed. 
Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? Do they
know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.
The subject of Arbus’s photographs is, to borrow the stately
Hegelian label, “the unhappy consciousness.” But most characters
in Arbus’s Grand Guignol appear not to know that they are ugly.
Arbus photographs people in various degrees of unconscious or
unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness. This necessarily
limits what kinds of horrors she might have been drawn to
photograph: it excludes sufferers who presumably know they are
suffering, like victims of accidents, wars, famines, and political
persecutions. Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents, 
events that break into a life; she specialized in slow-motion private
smashups, most of which had been going on since the subject’s
birth.
