Diane Arbus: Constellation
Park Avenue Armory
5 June – 17 August 2025
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
Diane Arbus has long held a paradoxical place in the history of photography. Hailed as a pioneer of psychological portraiture and condemned in equal measure for what some see as voyeurism, her work invites both intimacy and discomfort. In Constellation, now on view at the Park Avenue Armory through August 17, Arbus’s legacy is amplified to monumental scale.
Constellation is the largest presentation of her work ever mounted, featuring 454 photographs suspended throughout the Armory’s massive drill hall. The works on view were printed by Neil Selkirk, Arbus’s former student and longtime printer, the only person authorized by her estate to use her original negatives posthumously—a process that has shaped how much of her work has been seen and understood since her death. The exhibition avoids chronology, grouping, or text panels. Instead, viewers encounter a web of human faces arranged on towering metal scaffolds that crisscross the space like the skeletal frame of a building yet to be finished.
Born in 1923 into a wealthy New York family, Arbus turned away from commercial fashion photography in the 1950s to document people living outside the bounds of conventional beauty and status. Her black-and-white portraits, often lit with harsh flash and marked by emotional ambiguity, brought attention to subjects previously marginalized in mainstream photography. Her suicide in 1971 at age 48 only deepened the mystique around her images, many of which have since become canonical. Her legacy has been debated for decades. Some see her as a compassionate observer of difference, while others argue she exploited her subjects for shock value. That tension was visible from the start. When Arbus’s work was first posthumously shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972—a retrospective curated by John Szarkowski and featuring Neil Selkirk’s posthumous prints—the response was polarizing. While some praised the work’s boldness, others labeled it voyeuristic, grotesque, and even morally suspect. Her influence can be seen across generations of photographers, from Nan Goldin to Zanele Muholi, though her work continues to prompt debates about power, access, and ethics.
“Her memorable work … transformed the art of photography (Arbus is everywhere, for better and worse, in the work of artists today who make photographs), and it lent a fresh dignity to the forgotten and neglected people in whom she invested so much of herself.” —The New York Times
What makes Constellation ambitious is not only the scale of the installation, but its refusal to guide the viewer. Curated by Matthieu Humery, the exhibition allows visitors to roam freely among the lattice structures. Photographs hang at different heights, forcing you to crane your neck or crouch low. Occasionally, mirrors disrupt the sightlines, refracting both images and viewers back onto themselves. This approach has earned both praise and criticism. The New Yorker called it “a vertiginous pleasure” and likened it to an amusement park of human emotion, while other critics took a harsher view, claiming the layout “does so little” to deepen understanding of the work.
For all its visual power, the installation raises questions about the ethics of curation. With no labels, dates, or themes, the photographs float in space as if untethered from their historical context. While some view the layout as democratic, granting each image equal weight, others often perceive it as random. It invites projection rather than reflection, and for some viewers, this lack of structure diminishes the emotional weight of Arbus’s more intimate or unsettling images. Still, that very randomness may be part of the experience. You are meant to get lost, to encounter these lives without introduction, to discover your own rhythm as you walk the grid.
What emerges is not a cohesive narrative, but a kind of psychic map—a galaxy of people photographed over decades, many now gone. In one corner, a young boy scowls while holding a toy grenade. In another, a pair of identical twins stare blankly, iconic in their unsettling symmetry. Elsewhere, a middle-aged woman reclines on a striped mattress, her expression unreadable. None of it is chronological or thematic, yet some accidental juxtapositions are profoundly moving.
Some have criticized Arbus herself for what they perceive as a cold or classist gaze, suggesting her images exploit rather than reveal. However, “Constellation” appears to contradict that interpretation. It does not moralize, nor does it editorialize. It simply offers presence. Arbus never gave us captions that explained her subjects. Instead, she trusted the image to do the work. The exhibition takes the same risk.
Ultimately, Constellation is not an answer but an invitation. It asks how we look at others, how we categorize differences, and what we see when we are given no explanation at all. It is a chaotic, unsettling, strangely beautiful experience. Whether that is a failure of curation or a success depends entirely on what you bring to it and what you are willing to leave behind.
