In 1971, the great midcentury photographer Diane Arbus committed suicide at the Westbeth Artists Community in New York City. She was 48 years old. A year later there was a major show of her work at the Venice Biennale. In November 1972 in The New York Times, Hilton Kramer, reporting from the Biennale, confirmed that Arbus had achieved greatness in her work. You can read a full-length article by Kramer about Arbus at Google Books—I’m not sure if it’s identical to the Times piece but it looks to be more or less the same material.

Around the same time an interesting 30-minute documentary about her life and work was produced. The combination of the Biennale success and the documentary served as the full-throated introduction of Arbus’ work to the general public. The documentary is introduced by Arbus’ daughter Doon Arbus, who explains that some of Arbus’ lectures late in her life had been recorded by a student, and we see a montage of Arbus’ photographs while her words resonate over them. Also testifying to the importance of Arbus’ work are Austrian photographer Lisette Model; John Szarkowski, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art; and American artist Marvin Israel. It was Israel who discovered Arbus’ body after her suicide. 

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. … They made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. … If you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

Diane Arbus, “A Castle in Disneyland, Cal. 1962”
 
When Steve Martin was a teenager, he worked at a magic shop on the grounds of Disneyland. This excerpt comes from his 2008 book Born Standing Up:

My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.