From tipsy flappers to weary parents and circus performers, the great photographer captured life in all its raw beauty. Her biographer revels in the biggest show of Arbus work ever, combining rare, unseen and famous images
Diane Arbus: Constellation, an exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, is the largest display of Arbus prints ever mounted. In 2011, Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss pharmaceutical heiress who founded Luma, purchased all 454 printer’s proofs made by Neil Selkirk, the sole person authorised to print Arbus negatives after her suicide in 1971. At the suggestion of Luma photography curator Matthieu Humery, Hoffman is displaying all the photos for the first time, to mark the centenary of Arbus’s birth.