Eccentrics by Diane Arbus, initiated in late-1950s New York and pursued throughout her career, examines "singular people"—from sideshow performers and transvestites to twins, middle-class families, and other self-invented figures—across a spectrum of apparent normality.
Arbus pursued this constellation of subjects as her initially consuming obsession and a thread she never abandoned. She proposed it to Esquire in 1960 as a picture story on "eccentrics" — "the anomalies, the quixotic, the dedicated" — a piece the magazine ultimately refused, even as she was already extending the category beyond professional "freaks." The work investigates the tension between the anomalous and the rule-bound, insisting that the "freak beneath the facade" can surface anywhere. At the same time, the project functions as covert autobiography, tracing a photographer from a sheltered background as she refines her experience and seeks kinship with those who, in her words, have "passed their test in life."
Visually, the series is grounded in direct, frontal portraiture. Subjects tend to face the camera head-on, often centered and isolated within the frame, so that gesture, costume, and gaze become primary carriers of meaning. Whether in Times Square, Central Park, circuses, or Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus, the backgrounds usually remain plain enough to keep attention on the sitter, yet specific enough to register a social setting. The mood leans toward stillness and suspension; people appear paused rather than caught in motion, which intensifies the sense of encounter between viewer and subject and highlights the gap between how they intend to appear and how they are seen.
Technically speaking, Eccentrics straddles two phases of Arbus's practice. Early pictures from this period use a 35mm camera whose grain and limited tonal scale impart a rough, snapshot-like surface. Soon after, she shifted toward medium-format cameras such as the Rolleiflex, whose square negative and increased clarity supported the precise centering and dense detail that would characterize her mature portraits. Her growing use of on-camera flash, often close to the lens, flattens space and draws out textures—skin, fabric, makeup—so that every surface seems equally available to scrutiny.
The project’s initial life was uneven: rejected by Esquire, it appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1961 with Arbus’s own text, and later resurfaced in Infinity under the title "The Eccentric as Nature’s Aristocrats." These pictures fed directly into her contribution to MoMA’s New Documents exhibition in 1967, where responses ranged from fascination to open hostility. Over time, the work has come to be seen as part of a broader shift in documentary photography toward private, psychological realities and a wider sense of what counts as a legitimate subject, a status reinforced by the 1972 MoMA retrospective and Aperture monograph that have made it a reference point for later photographers concerned with identity and difference in the posed portrait.
