Diane Arbus's women and transvestites

Abstract

Although Diane Arbus was not an overtly political photographer, her concern with human appearances as defmed by sex, age, and social roles deserves re-examination for it focuses on the visual identity of women in our society. The monograph Diane Arbus, the only extant major book on her noncommercial work, is a fair if numerically limited assessment of her scope, and in the main, accurately reflects the visual world she recorded in her contact sheets.1 This world is not an even-handed one, for it is disproportionately and stereotypically female through its depiction of women, transvestites, vulnerable men and a generally private leisure society where subjects display a frontal and emotional gaze and identify themselves through clothing and gesture.

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