The Giant

Arbus, who was born in 1923 and died by her own hand in 1971, was the greatest American portrait photographer of her generation. Indeed, with the possible exception of Robert Frank, she may be that cohort’s greatest photographer of any sort. She was also a woman possessed. Typecast as a collector of sideshow freaks, Arbus might equally be termed a surrealist ethnographer, a tragic humanist, a sensation-seeking existentialist, or, in the tradition of 19th-century French outsider poets, a camera-artist maudit.