Chaos and Discovery: Diane Arbus's Constellation

Brian Byrd is a freelance photographer with more than two decades of experience advancing communication as a catalyst for social change. He serves on the board of directors for the Overseas Press Club of America and the advisory board for WITNESS, a global NGO founded by musician Peter Gabriel that uses video and digital technology to document human rights violations.

Diane Arbus: *Constellation*, 2025, Park Avenue Armory
Installation Photo: Nicholas Knight

The Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Park Avenue Armory in New York City became a cosmos of human revelation this summer, housing the most comprehensive presentation of Diane Arbus's work ever assembled. Constellation, running through August 17, transforms more than 450 photographs into an immersive geography of seeing—a radical departure from the linear narratives typically imposed on photographic exhibitions.

Diane Arbus revolutionized photography by turning her lens toward society's margins with unflinching intimacy and psychological depth. Her portraits of people with disabilities, circus performers, transgender individuals, and other outsiders challenged conventional notions of beauty and normalcy, forcing viewers to confront their own prejudices and assumptions. In Constellation's web-like installation, this confrontational power multiplies as visitors encounter unexpected juxtapositions between her subjects—each meeting revealing new layers of her systematic exploration of what society preferred to ignore.

The Invisible Made Visible

What curator Matthieu Humery has achieved with Constellation transcends traditional exhibition-making. The constellation concept emerged from a moment of synchronicity during a subway ride, when Humery looked up from reading a compilation of Arbus's writings to see a map of the New York subway system, snaking beneath and among the settings of most of her photos. "It was a kind of synchronicity," says Humery. "Seeing the subway plan sparked the idea of having all these images and having the viewer explore them, the way that Diane Arbus did New York. You have to look around and find your own way."

The curatorial team recognized that Arbus's process was never linear but rather resembled "a network of paths that intersect and drawn, like a spider's web, hundreds of points on the map all linked together by a unique desire for poetic revelation." Traditional chronological or thematic arrangements would have imposed artificial order on work born from wandering and chance discovery. Instead, the constellation format occurred to the curators as "a structure capable of presenting both the images and the imperceptible architecture underlying all creations: chance, chaos, and exploration."

The stars of Constellation are a whopping 454 Arbus works: every picture she was known to have printed before her death by suicide in 1971 at the age of 48. In black frames and white mats, gelatin silver prints of various sizes and scales float at staggered heights on black latticework panels within an expansive, white-walled subdivision of the Armory's soaring Drill Hall. This vast and dynamic cosmos defied chronological or thematic organization in favor of elegant explosion—a shattered archive that invites viewers not only to look but to look again, up and down, through and back; to scrutinize, squint, crouch, crane, compare, contrast, and, above all, connect, just as Arbus did.

The installation deliberately offers no tour directions or prescribed routes, embodying Arbus's own philosophy: “I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” These 454 images represent Neil Selkirk's complete set of printer's proofs, which the LUMA Foundation acquired in 2011. Selkirk is the sole person authorized to make posthumous prints from Diane Arbus's negatives.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Constellation lies in its acknowledgment of the profound relationship between photographer and printer. Selkirk's essay In the Darkroom reveals the painstaking devotion required to honor Arbus's vision posthumously. Working in her original darkroom with her equipment, he spent hours aligning negatives and remixing chemistry to achieve prints indistinguishable from her own hand.

This technical mastery becomes philosophical meditation. As Selkirk notes, even Arbus herself rarely made identical prints—the nature of gelatin-silver printing in a rudimentary darkroom ensures each object's uniqueness. The exhibition thus presents not just photographs, but artifacts of a specific moment in photographic history when the physical act of printing was inseparable from artistic expression.

Diane Arbus: *Constellation*, 2025, Park Avenue Armory
All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus exhibited courtesy of Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation
Installation Photo: Nicholas Knight

New York as Mirror and Method

The decision to present Constellation in New York carries profound significance beyond geographic convenience. The curatorial concept was specifically designed to honor Arbus's relationship with the city, which was both intimate and exploratory. As the exhibition materials note, "Like Diane Arbus in New York, the viewer is invited to wander, pass by, go around and across. There isn't a standard route, but an infinite number of possibilities."

This methodology reflects Arbus's own process of "tireless search" and "countless hours of walking, dictated as much by the element of chance as by the indescribable intuition of instinct." The Armory's industrial grandeur becomes the perfect container for this urban exploration, allowing visitors to experience what the curators describe as "the movement of her gaze, which in reality glides here and there. A face, a detail, an attitude, a particularity."

Rebecca Robertson, the Armory's Founding President, emphasizes how the installation format allows visitors to "step into the Drill Hall and immerse themselves within Diane Arbus's world—one marked by raw humanity, curiosity, and deep empathy." The constellation format transforms viewing into a form of discovery that parallels Arbus's own photographic practice—revealing "what lies between the pictures; what, like dark matter, keeps all of these photographs in equilibrium and connects them to each other." Along this exploratory path, visitors encounter Arbus icons—including the square-format images in the pivotal portfolio A box of ten photographs—alongside discoveries that include early, small-format works. Placed largely at eye level, these find Arbus honing her signature move: collapsing the distance between nature and artifice, leaving the two to clash like the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, raw and indelible.

The Persistence of Provocation

Fifty-four years after her death, Arbus's work continues to challenge comfortable assumptions about documentary photography and social observation. Arbus possessed an extraordinary ability to capture the vulnerability and dignity of her subjects simultaneously, creating images that were both unsettling and deeply humanizing. Her direct, confrontational style and willingness to photograph the "freaks" and misfits that polite society preferred to ignore expanded photography's capacity for social commentary and empathy.

The constellation format amplifies this effect by removing hierarchical structures. No single image dominates; instead, patterns emerge through proximity and contrast that mirror human complexity. A portrait of twins might resonate with an image of carnival performers, suggesting deeper questions about identity, performance, and the construction of social roles. These visual dialogues reveal how Arbus's systematic exploration of society's margins created a comprehensive map of human difference and dignity.

The exhibition's complementary programming includes screenings of conversations between Selkirk and Christie's Darius Himes, recorded during Constellation's original presentation at LUMA Arles. These discussions illuminate Arbus's technical innovations—her use of direct flash, square format, and unflinching proximity to subjects—that set her apart from contemporaries and influenced generations of photographers.

Selkirk's continuing role as the sole authorized printer of Arbus's negatives raises fascinating questions about artistic legacy and authenticity. His commitment to matching her original prints has preserved not just images, but a specific aesthetic philosophy about how photographs should appear as physical objects.

Contemporary Resonance

In an era of digital ubiquity and social media self-presentation, Arbus's analog intimacy feels both historical and prophetic. Her willingness to photograph people as they were, rather than as they wished to appear, anticipated contemporary discussions about representation, consent, and the ethics of image-making. The raw emotional intensity of her work, combined with her tragic suicide at age 48, cemented her status as a legendary figure who demonstrated that photography could serve as both mirror and window into the human condition.

Constellation entrusts viewers to create their own interpretive pathways through Arbus's work. The absence of prescribed routes mirrors her own approach to photography—wandering, observing, discovering. For practitioners interested in understanding how individual vision can reshape an entire medium, this exhibition offers unparalleled access to both the breadth of Arbus's achievement and the specific conditions that made it possible.

Chaos and Discovery: Diane Arbus's Constellation

The Invisible Made Visible

New York as Mirror and Method

The Persistence of Provocation

Contemporary Resonance

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