The myth of American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-71) is remarkably durable. Mention her name and a familiar shorthand materializes. The documenter of "freaks", of outsiders, of those on the very margins of American life.
It's a theme that's calcified into received wisdom, reinforced by decades of critical writing and gallery retrospectives. But the problem with received wisdom is that it tends to stop us actually looking.
Consider three photographs from the collection of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, coming to auction at Bonhams New York this April. Together, they make the case for a different Arbus entirely.
The first is Courtship, Teenage Couple, Hudson St, 1963, the collection's headline photography lot. A boy and a girl stand against a brick wall. He has his arm around her shoulder with the studied casualness of someone who has been practising. She holds herself slightly apart, not quite leaning in.
Neither of them is a freak. Neither is marginal. They're entirely ordinary; two teenagers on the verge of something, uncertain of their footing, performing couplehood for a camera and perhaps for each other.
What Arbus captures here is not otherness but self-consciousness: the universal, slightly excruciating experience of being looked at before you have decided who you are.
Defying categorization
The second, Two Ladies at the Automat, NYC, 1966, tilts the argument further. Two older women sit in a diner booth, dressed with careful formality: elaborate hats, jewellery, patterned jackets. One holds a cigarette.
Both look directly into the lens with an expression that resists easy categorization. It is not warmth, nor hostility, nor the blank stare of the unwitting subject. It is composure.
These women have chosen how they wish to appear in the world and they are not about to be talked out of it by a camera. If Arbus was hunting vulnerability, she found the opposite here. What she found was armor.
The third photograph is perhaps the most revealing of all. Four People at a Gallery Opening, NYC depicts the kind of scene Arbus is rarely associated with: evening dress, cocktail glasses, chandeliers.
These are establishment figures in an establishment setting. And yet Arbus finds in them the same quality she found everywhere.
The slight awkwardness of the social performance. The gap between the role being played and the person playing it. The man on the left grins too broadly. The woman looks a little lost and detached. They are not outsiders. They are all of us, caught in the act of trying.
Seen together, these three images reframe everything. Arbus' subject was not deviance. It was the experience of being observed, and the extraordinary variety of ways that human beings meet that experience.
Illuminating the strangeness
There is something fitting about the fact that these particular photographs were owned by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner.
These two celebrated women, who'd spent careers being looked at, understood instinctively what Arbus was doing. Not pointing at the strange, but illuminating the strangeness that lives inside the ordinary. Every social occasion a performance. Every portrait a negotiation.
To truly collect Arbus is to understand that she was never really interested in outsiders. She was interested in the inside of everyone.
Lily Tomlin & Jane Wagner: Wit, Women & The Art of Collecting takes place at Bonhams New York on April 08 2026. The accompanying online sale runs March 31 - April 9.
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