Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum gathers photographs made between 1961 and 1971 in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London. Bedrooms and domestic interiors become sites of encounter, where Arbus’s subjects receive the camera within spaces ordinarily closed to strangers. The setting matters: identity is seen not in isolation, but in relation to rooms, possessions, gestures, and the terms of access established between photographer and subject.
The people represented span the breadth of Arbus’s attention—debutantes and nudists, socialites and circus performers, lovers, widows, babies, public figures and those aspiring to visibility. Yet the book’s organizing principle is neither social category nor spectacle. It is proximity. These portraits register the unusual degree of permission Arbus could obtain, while preserving the tension inherent in being looked at. Intimacy here does not imply simple disclosure; it remains poised between self-presentation, confidence, and ambiguity.
The selection places lesser-known photographs alongside more familiar works, encouraging close reconsideration rather than a summary view of Arbus’s career. Concentrating on a single decade and a clearly defined kind of setting gives the book the character of a focused study. Across its 92 pages, the recurring movement from person to interior—and from interior back to person—clarifies how deeply environment participates in Arbus’s portraiture.
Published by David Zwirner Books in 2025 and designed by Katy Homans, the volume accompanies exhibitions jointly presented by David Zwirner in London and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. For a serious photography collection, its importance lies not in comprehensiveness but in precision: it isolates a sustained aspect of Arbus’s practice and sets recognizable images into a more exacting thematic context. The result is a compact lens on questions central to her work—access, privacy, performance, and the charged exchange produced when a camera enters a personal realm.
