Diane Arbus drew most of her subjects from the streets of her hometown, New York City: The chapeau-ed society ladies of Fifth Avenue; the young, unsmiling couples of Washington Square Park; the swimmers and sideshow performers of Coney Island; not to mention the cross-dressers, celebrities, children, and everyone in between. It’s what makes “Diane Arbus: Constellation,” the largest exhibition of the photographer’s images to date, feel something like a homecoming. Co-presented by LUMA, the show is on view at the Park Avenue Armory through August 17, with many of its more than 450 photographs never before seen publicly.
Upon entering the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, visitors are greeted by an endless sea of faces. To convey the objectivity so central to Arbus’s art, the works are not arranged chronologically or by subject. There are also no wall plaques or titles, even for the most famous images. In fact, there are hardly any walls at all, with the portraits instead affixed to tall, grid-like beams in a scattershot arrangement throughout the space, with no clear flow for foot traffic. Inspired by the New York City subway map, curator Matthieu Humery wanted the exhibition’s layout to echo Arbus’s experience identifying subjects in New York: “You have to look around and find your own way.”
Serving to exaggerate the size of the Drill Hall is a spotless mirror along the southern wall. The backs of all of the pictures are also mirrored, so that visitors see themselves quite literally reflected in Arbus’s work. ”It’s just you and the picture,” Humery says.
As I wound my way through the show, I began to understand what he meant. There are dozens of photographs in every direction, and without any organizing principle, you are guided only by what catches your eye. I passed over the shot of a pockmarked man, drawn instead to the jolly, moneyed woman whose apparent pride in her appearance evoked in me both a wave of embarrassment and terrific affection. Then, I was beckoned over by a sword-swallower mid-gulp, an image so full of movement, it was as if the fabric of her carnival tent was softly undulating behind her.
The scale of the exhibit becomes even more impressive when you consider that every single one of these prints was produced by one Neil Selkirk. “ All I’ve ever been is the guy who made the prints,” he says modestly. Selkirk was a former student of Arbus’s who, following her death by suicide in 1971, became the only person allowed to make prints from her negatives.
Selkirk recalls the early days of that work: Poring over Arbus’s prints, figuring out how to reverse-engineer her printing process to make a perfect duplicate—a task made more challenging by her exacting standards and unconventional methods. As he puts it: “[Hers] looked like pictures that everybody knew were the truth, whereas all the pictures on museum walls looked like pictures that they knew had been manipulated.”
Selkirk’s prints were initially featured in Arbus’s 1972 retrospective at MoMA, which received scathing reviews from certain critics, who claimed that Arbus’s work was voyeuristic, grotesque, and exploitative. But her champions assert that it was just the opposite. “Constellation” includes a 90-minute film featuring Selkirk called What Diane Arbus Wasn’t Doing, and How She Wasn’t Doing It, which confronts her most common critiques. In our interview, Selkirk tells me that Arbus “was completely non-judgmental of people. It didn’t mean she didn t think some people were awful, but they were entitled to be…the photograph was just a record of something that was.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Diane Arbus exhibit without ripples of unease. I averted my gaze at the monkey cradled like a baby in a woman’s arms and the angry glares of certain men, but then again, aren’t such constant, varying confrontations of beauty, tenderness, and strangeness just as present on an average day in New York, or any other city?
Another image stays in my mind: Two young women with Down syndrome smiling and unselfconscious. As someone who grew up with loved ones with visible disabilities, I have become painfully aware of the gaze of others while out in public (IYKYK), and to Selkirk’s point, there’s a total absence of that in Arbus’s photograph. In the moment, a certain exhilaration bloomed inside me. It felt special and rare to see a portrait like this without any kind of commentary forced on it, even in 2025; more than 50 years later, so many of Arbus’s subjects, those described as ”pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive” after her 1972 retrospective, still carry the weight of our prejudices. In this way, “Constellation” holds up yet another reflection.
When asked what he hopes visitors will take away from the exhibit, Selkirk replies: “A decision to be less judgmental.”
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” is on view through August 17, 2025, at the Park Avenue Armory.