Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was born Diane Nemerov in New York in 1923, into the family behind the Fifth Avenue department store Russeks, and spent the 1940s and 1950s in fashion photography with her husband Allan Arbus. She studied with Lisette Model from around 1956 and left fashion behind. By the early 1960s she had moved from a 35mm camera to a square-format twin-lens reflex, and the pictures she is known for date from then: identical twins in Roselle, a boy with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, a Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, nudists, performers and families at home, all met head-on. The Museum of Modern Art showed her in New Documents in 1967. She died in 1971.

The central question is who made the print. Arbus printed her own work, and prints made in her lifetime are comparatively few. Since 1972 the estate has authorised posthumous prints made from her negatives by Neil Selkirk, the only printer permitted to do so, and those carry the estate's stamp completed in ink; they are a different object from a lifetime print even where the image is identical. A Box of Ten Photographs, the portfolio she began in 1970, was completed in only a handful of sets before her death. Stamps, inscriptions and the paper need reading together, and the estate, whose archive went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007, is the reference.