Viewing Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner

Diane Arbus’ explosive and subversive work is well known, yet this is a rare chance to get up close with it in London, in a careful and compelling curation of 45 photographs at David Zwirner gallery (until 20 December). The works were all made between 1961 and 1971 – the decade before Arbus’ major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

The show’s title suggests a private, inner world and the photographs on display focus on settings that invite and evoke intimacy, taken in bedrooms and hotel rooms, Arbus’ subjects’ sacred space. Her subjects are socialites and transvestites, nudists and disabled people, debutantes all of them fundamentally – humans.

Arbus’ photographs challenged conventions about who should be seen and looked at, where beauty might be found and celebrated, and questioned what ‘normal’ looked like. She was aware of the discomfort and awkwardness her intended audience might feel at her pictures, too – and the impossibility of truly representing another person in a picture. In her own words, “what I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.”