Photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) found most of her subjects in New York, the city in which she was born. Her portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, people on the street, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—stands as an allegory of postwar America and an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. For Arbus, photography was a medium that tangled with the facts. Many of her subjects face the camera implicitly aware of their collaboration in the portrait-making process. In her photographs, the self-conscious encounter between photographer and subject becomes a central drama of the picture.
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