Few artistic bodies of work yield the gut wrenching emotional impact of Diane Arbus’s photography. Almost every single image the artist captured is layered with a near uncomfortable level of psychological complexity. On one hand, you could read Arbus’s portraits of society’s outsiders, the marginalized, as deeply complicated yet fascinating interactions between a contemplative and empathetic artist and subjects hesitantly curious to see their images rendered. You could also read those same images as the results of a bourgeoise woman looking down upon those below her socioeconomic and social level. Thus, it is equally possible to be as taken with Arbus’s immense genius as it is to be disturbed at the thought of an artist staging and manipulating vulnerable humans to her own creative will. One has to assume that at least some of Arbus’s portraits are products of intensely bizarre and uncomfortable interactions with the subjects. Arbus seemed to demonstrate interest in her viewers' admiration for her brilliance and discomfort with her methods. In fact, I’m sure she would have willingly embraced that dilemma. “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do,” one said Arbus. “That was one of my favorite things about it. I felt very perverse.”

With that, it can be assumed that Arbus was self-aware about the provocative nature of her images. And in a brilliant new show at David Zwirner, inaugurating a collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery as the newly minted co-representatives of The Estate of Diane Arbus, Arbus’s complicated genius permeates the space. The 66 "Untitled" images on display were shot from 1969 to 1971,  consequentially the year of Arbus’s suicide, and depicted the inhabitants of residencies for the developmentally disabled. Arbus returned to the facilities repeatedly for those years; for Halloween parties, for picnics, for dances; and it is probably fair to say that in that time she developed, at the very least, friendly rapports with the humans she photographed. Most of the critics who take issue with Arbus’s portraiture take it with the underlying 'creepiness' of all of her pictures. The father of the now iconic twins pictured in Arbus’s infamous picture ‘Identical Twins, Rochelle, New York’ (1967) has famously said that Arbus’s picture of his children was the worst likeness of them he’d ever seen.

And it’s true: a pervasive sense of unease, or “creepiness,” defines many of Arbus’s images. Though her practice had some element of photojournalism, her unique sense of staging, her high contrast black and white, and the startling sharpness in the images put Arbus’s photographs firmly within the manipulative canon of fine art. But the "Untitled" pictures of the developmentally disabled also have a melancholic beauty to them. In certain images, these people appear to be the most willing subjects Arbus ever worked with. In one image, a disabled woman missing many teeth, looks off frame and has a look that could only be described as ecstatic. Arbus’s work suggests that we, the viewers, are just as on our high horses in our critiques of Arbus's work as Arbus herself was as a white woman of means photographing cultural outsiders. It could be, her images suggest, that these people have as much agency in the distribution of their images as we do, and that they too like being photographed.

Arbus’s photography is an art of duality. The beautiful is almost always accompanied by the grotesque. The sublime is interspersed with angst. In the "Untitled" pictures, it wouldn’t be surprising to find something that fills you with joy in the same image that you found something that filled you with dread. In one fascinating picture, most likely at least partially staged, a male little person of color in a demonstrates a kind of dance technique akin to a b-boy breakdance while two other figures, most likely also disabled but in a less physically obvious way, both demonstrate expressions that wouldn’t be so out of a place in a demonic possession in a horror movie. Arbus calls attention to vibrant expressions of joy while never letting us forget life's eternal anguish. Some critics have suggested that Arbus sees herself in her subjects. But perhaps that’s only partially true. It’s probably a more factual assertion to claim that Arbus sees all of us in her subjects.

Arbus captured these "Untitled" images both inside and outdoors of the facilities; most are shot in flash, some are not. The images’ mystical qualities take form through Arbus’s razor sharp focus on and fascination with the subjects’ rituals. Whether they are posing for the camera, or smiling, or captured mid-task, or dancing, Arbus locates beauty within repetitious behavior. Arbus actually admitted in a letter to her husband that the hospitals’ patients were the first subjects she sought to capture numerous images of, as opposed to a singular “best picture” of. These ritualistic gestures, whether staged or candid, inform a kind of performative reading of the work. Though perhaps naively, and some critics would even argue coerced into, these subjects perform for the camera. In a large portion of the pictures, the subjects wear masks, obscuring representations of their identities. The imposition of Arbus’s psychology and fantasies onto the images feels particularly seamless in the "Untitled" pictures because the exterior world that Arbus is working within is already so rich and layered.

Critic Hilton Als writes that Arbus’s "Untitled" works are “the pictures she had waited her entire life to take.” I feel that, but perhaps for reasons more vague than I can discernibly articulate. If Arbus’s primary focus was indeed on “the marginalized” or society on the margins then these "Untitled" pictures might be the most objectively pure distillations of that focus. So many of Arbus’s outsiders: side show performers, drag queens, strippers and others are considered “outsiders” merely through cultural signifiers and socioeconomic standing. Therefore, they can only be read as outsiders through a kind of wrongheaded classification on the part of the viewer.  And indeed, the concept of society imposing identity onto the individual is one that permeates most of Arbus’s work. The subjects of "Untitled" however are outsiders by circumstances (their learning disabilities), their physical isolation (hospitalized) and, in hindsight, the restrictions of the time period they lived in (a time years before significant breakthroughs in the understanding of developmental disabilities). These characters are truly outside normal structures of modern civilization: education, labor, and otherwise. In this way, it certainly becomes clear that these were the types of subjects that Arbus had been searching for through her work. These subjects have been systematically rendered outsiders, and to perceive them as such requires no judgement or classification be made by the viewers.

Arbus’s influence over contemporary fine art photography is perhaps without equal. But the photographers who seem the most impacted by her legacy are those image makers that are able to blend their personalized inner world into the outer realities that they capture: the haunting beauty and reverence in Nan Goldin’s portraiture of her downtown New York art friends, the blunt and brutal street portraits of Bruce Gilden, and the inner turmoil and anxiety in Roger Ballen’s blending of surreal stage setting and portraits of South African asylum patients. All of these photographers took from Arbus the need to say something very specific about and articulate a very particular idea to a world that they are interested in inhabiting but capable of merely scratching at the edges of.

Arbus’s "Untitled" pictures would be the closest she would ever get to living in a world that triggered her fascination. Tragically, they would also be the last pictures she would ever take: Arbus's suicide hangs over the "Untitled" works like a specter and it's impossible to not lavish in the surreal power of her images without feeling the anguish and dread that Arbus most assuredly would have been suffering during the time that she made this work. Her work has also never felt more brutally direct, or poignantly beautiful, or staggeringly clear. The academic and writer Germaine Greer, who Arbus photographed in 1971, said Arbus’s photographs were merely focused on “human imperfection and self-delusion.” Arbus’s only delusion was believing, or hoping, that others would share her peculiar fixations. But to say that her work is merely about human imperfection is both accurate and laughably dismissive. Arbus surely was focused on human imperfection, but within imperfection, she found unvarnished, perfect humanity. And humanity, to Arbus, was beautiful.

Forbes, review by Adam Lehrer