Diane Arbus has been dead for 45 years. Her work is not new to the world, and it is not new to me. So she should not have the power to conquer my brain this week. But that’s what she’s doing. I would like to be writing a straightforward review of a show in Sodo, but I am locked up, convinced that the only legitimate thing to do is to write about the show in relation to Arbus. I think this is happening because of something she said, and then something Arthur Lubow said about her.
Arbus, according to Lubow’s new 700-page biography, told a story once about what she called the “ultimate” photograph. It was one she saw in a magazine, probably sometime in the 1960s, of a photographer shooting a picture of a man who was shooting the photographer with a gun…
