To speak about Diane Arbus is to enter uncomfortable territory. Few photographers have generated such a persistent debate around the ethics of the gaze, around the boundary between portrait and exposure, between empathy and voyeurism.
For decades, one idea has been repeated insistently: that of Arbus as the author of a cruel, almost predatory gaze, one that uses her subjects as objects of morbid fascination. That idea, which by now can be called a myth, has been simplified into an easy label, useful for dismissing a complex body of work without the need to truly look at it.
This article aims to dismantle that reductive reading. Not to absolve Diane Arbus of every ethical discomfort her work raises, but to place her practice within a broader historical, cultural and human context, and to rethink her legacy through a contemporary sensibility that can no longer afford binary judgments. Arbus’s work is not comfortable, but it is not simple either. Above all, it is not cruel in the superficial sense so often attributed to it.
Diane Arbus began her career at a key moment in American photography. The late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties were a period of transition. The postwar American dream was beginning to show cracks, television was homogenizing imaginaries, and advertising was imposing increasingly rigid models of beauty, success and normality. Photography, meanwhile, oscillated between the humanism inherited from the FSA tradition and a commercial practice that glorified aspiration. Arbus emerged precisely at that point, but she chose to look elsewhere.
While much documentary photography continued to focus on the street, social conflict or everyday heroism, Arbus turned her camera toward what society preferred not to see, or only to see as anomaly. People with disabilities, transvestites, circus performers, nudists, twins, children with unsettling gazes, bourgeois families crossed by a strange rigidity. Her work speaks less about marginality than about normality and its edges. Arbus did not photograph what was strange. She photographed what happens when categories fail.
The myth of the cruel gaze is built partly on this choice of subjects. There is a comfortable reading that claims Arbus photographed freaks and exposed them for the cultural consumption of an elite. But that reading overlooks a fundamental fact: Arbus’s relationship with the people she photographed. Unlike the photographer who steals an image from a distance, Arbus worked through encounter. She spent time with her subjects, spoke with them, returned. Many of her photographs are not the result of a snatched moment, but of a relationship, brief or extended, but conscious.
The frontal quality of her portraits has often been interpreted as aggression. That direct gaze, that body placed before the camera without aesthetic escape, is unsettling because it breaks the usual contract of portraiture, which tends to beautify, soften or at least offer a symbolic exit. In Arbus, there is no exit. But to confuse discomfort with cruelty is a common mistake. Cruelty implies an intention to harm or humiliate. In Arbus, there is instead a will to confront.
Susan Sontag was one of the most influential voices in consolidating the critical reading of Arbus. In her essay on the photographer, Sontag speaks of a gaze that turns subjects into others, reinforcing the distance between the viewer and what is being observed. That text, brilliant in many respects, has often been read almost as a definitive verdict. Yet it also reflects a specific sensibility, a particular historical moment, and a certain relationship to the photographic image.
Seen from today’s perspective, Sontag’s critique reveals as much about Arbus as it does about a fear of ambiguity. Because Arbus’s work does not reassure the viewer. It does not allow the spectator to occupy a morally comfortable position. Her portraits do not say look how different this person is, but rather look at how your gaze functions when confronted with this. The true subject of Arbus’s photography is not the person portrayed, but the viewer’s reaction.
This is where the myth of the cruel gaze begins to crack. The cruelty is not in the image, but in the hurried reading that seeks to protect itself from discomfort. Arbus does not mock her subjects. Nor does she idealize them. She presents them in their complexity, with dignity and with strangeness, without explicit moral hierarchies. In many of her photographs, the supposed difference dissolves when the viewer lingers. What is unsettling is not the subject, but the mirror the image holds up.
It is significant that Arbus also photographed affluent families, middle class children, conventional couples. And that these images are often as disturbing as those depicting social margins. In this sense, her work does not draw a line between the normal and the abnormal, but demonstrates that this line is a fragile construction. Discomfort runs through her entire body of work because it points to an uncomfortable truth: we all participate, to some degree, in strangeness.
From a contemporary ethical perspective, Arbus’s work raises fundamental questions about consent, representation and power. It is legitimate to ask to what extent a person understands how their image will be read within the context of art. That question remains fully relevant today, in the age of social media and mass image circulation. But judging Arbus by current standards without attending to her context is a form of moral anachronism.
Arbus worked at a time when the visibility of certain bodies and identities was almost nonexistent outside spectacle or caricature. Her photography does not create difference. It makes it visible within a register that is neither pornographic nor paternalistic. There is an ethics of presence in her work, an insistence on looking directly at what society hides, not to exploit it, but to force us to recognize it as part of the shared world.
Contemporary readings of Arbus have begun to shift. New generations of artists, theorists and curators no longer see her primarily as a photographer of the monstrous, but as an author who understood identity as unstable, performative and relational long before these concepts became central to cultural discourse. Her interest in disguise, in everyday theatricality, in bodies that challenge norms, connects directly with current debates around gender, identity and representation.
In this sense, Arbus is surprisingly contemporary. Her work dialogues with practices that question normative ways of seeing, that reclaim the complexity of portraiture, and that reject the idea of a respectful image understood as a neutral or pleasing one. Arbus reminds us that there is no innocent gaze, but also that discomfort can be a form of honesty.
The myth of the cruel gaze is also fed by Arbus’s tragic biography. Her suicide has often been used, explicitly or implicitly, to reinforce the image of a dark author obsessed with the disturbing. This psychologizing reading reduces her work to an extension of her personal suffering and avoids engaging with what her images actually propose. It is a way of closing the debate when, in fact, Arbus opens it.
To reread Diane Arbus today is to accept discomfort without rushing to domesticate it. It is to recognize that her work does not offer clear answers, but persistent questions. What do we expect from a portrait. Whom does the idea of a correct gaze protect. What do we do, as viewers, with what disorients us. Instead of seeking culprits or absolution, Arbus’s work invites us to assume our responsibility as readers of images.
More than a cruel photographer, Diane Arbus was a radically honest one. Her camera does not caress, but it does not wound either. It points. And in that gesture, it leaves us exposed to ourselves. The myth of cruelty dissolves when we understand that what unsettles us is not a lack of ethics on the part of the photographer, but the fragility of our own moral categories when faced with the complexity of the human.
Perhaps that is her most enduring contribution. To remind us that photography is not there to comfort us, but to force us to look better. And that looking better almost always means accepting that discomfort is not a failure of art, but one of its most necessary functions.
