Just saw the Diane Arbus show at Park Avenue Armory. Critics say it omits the fact that she was an upper-class woman photographing people on the margins. I got a different message.

The power dynamic is real, and the exhibition did sidestep it. But after spending time with the pictures, what I saw was intimacy.

🔍 Arbus wrote in a letter to her husband: “I want to photograph everyone.” Her camera landed on the 400-pound man on his couch and teens smoking in the park, the nudist family and the woman alone in a waiting room, the 3-legged circus performer and the old couple kissing on a bench. The dominatrix. People in love, people sitting at home, people existing.

What struck me wasn’t just the oddity, but something closer to complicity.

There’s always a voyeur in us photographers, but Arbus’s real power seemed to be access. Her subjects rarely look surprised or defensive. Their gazes are direct. Proud, frank, complicit, almost piercing. As if they were in on it, not just objects of it.

🚪 Who gets invited into a space without first establishing trust?

The show left out her commercial work (for Esquire, etc.), and I would’ve liked to see how she carried her vision into it. But what I might have found redundant in the composition at first (the deadpan, centered, locked-in posture) was offset by the sheer diversity of her subjects. Maybe that’s the point.

Photographers are always negotiating power and permission.
🔁 Arbus’s legacy reminds us that access isn’t accidental. And that the gaze goes both ways.