Selkirk’s prints were initially featured in Arbus’s 1972 retrospective at MoMA, which received scathing reviews from certain critics, who claimed that Arbus’s work was voyeuristic, grotesque, and exploitative. But her champions assert that it was just the opposite. “Constellation” includes a 90-minute film featuring Selkirk called What Diane Arbus Wasn’t Doing, and How She Wasn’t Doing It, which confronts her most common critiques. In our interview, Selkirk tells me that Arbus “was completely non-judgmental of people. It didn’t mean she didn’t think some people were awful, but they were entitled to be…the photograph was just a record of something that was.”

Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus exhibited courtesy of Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation.

Photo: Nicholas Knight

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Diane Arbus exhibit without ripples of unease. I averted my gaze at the monkey cradled like a baby in a woman’s arms and the angry glares of certain men, but then again, aren’t such constant, varying confrontations of beauty, tenderness, and strangeness just as present on an average day in New York, or any other city?

Another image stays in my mind: Two young women with Down syndrome smiling and unselfconscious. As someone who grew up with loved ones with visible disabilities, I have become painfully aware of the gaze of others while out in public (IYKYK), and to Selkirk’s point, there’s a total absence of that in Arbus’s photograph. In the moment, a certain exhilaration bloomed inside me. It felt special and rare to see a portrait like this without any kind of commentary forced on it, even in 2025; more than 50 years later, so many of Arbus’s subjects, those described as ”pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive” after her 1972 retrospective, still carry the weight of our prejudices. In this way, “Constellation” holds up yet another reflection.