Despite what initially appears to be their photojournalistic intentionality, the records of her encounters, Arbus's photographs, to remind the reader of a by-now-familiar litany, use the body in a novel manner as a metaphor or parable for the collision of culture and the body in the 1960s. Her bodies are surfaces upon which culture and artifice are displayed... Arbus's subjects reveal the body at a new cultural nexus...Arbus's photographs of bodies may be viewed, in a larger sense, as a critique of the historical connection between the positivist structure.
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-Frederick Gross
Human Multiples
There is a photo Diane shot in 1963, of a set of teenage triplets in their bedroom somewhere in New Jersey, one of the first in her series of “human multiples"...But it’s in the faces on these look-alike sisters that this photograph takes a mythic turn. From left to right, their emotions read wise, happy, sad, their differences as blunt as a row of ancient theater masks...Diane gives us an image that transforms each aspect of ourselves into someone wholly separate, as if to acknowledge how much we can be at war with ourselves...As a teenager, Diane Nemerov imagined herself as a kind of human multiple, one girl with many faces.