Diane Arbus sought the seedy, the edgy, and the less popular in her photographs. Among the locales that she would visit were public parks and seedy hotels. She wanted to document and bring awareness to the many smaller subcultures that were all a part of New York City. This brought her a fair deal of criticism, as well as the label of a photographer of freaks, to which she replied, “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.” The people who were outcast by society were a frequent subject of Arbus’ work- homosexuals, cross-dressers, people with physical and mental disabilities, all found their way into Arbus’ works. By 1960, a series of photos by Arbus had found their way into Esquire magazine-these photos were a significant change of direction from her earlier work with Allan Arbus.

Throughout the 1960s, Diane Arbus was a well-known artistic figure in New York City. Arbus did not like to arrange her photographs. She was of the belief that “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” She arranged herself to meet the needs of the subject, rather than arranging the subject to meet her needs. She made an effort to be personable with her subjects. And usually they would appreciate that. By doing this, Arbus was able to remove the public facade that these people would typically drape over themselves, and capture the true personality of her subject. She always had the attention of her subjects: in almost every portrait they’re looking directly at the camera, so that when someone sees the picture, they see it as though they’re looking right at them, and they can see who these people really are. They can’t do that when they see these people on the street. In that case, prejudice gets in the way.

She would not only photograph the unusual and the marginal, however. Many of her photos capture the ordinary. Her photos include ones such as a couple on a park bench, and one of an elderly woman riding a bus. It goes to show that Diane Arbus had a variety to her work, even though there was an overarching main idea which she had in all the photographs that she took. Commercial photography captured the glamorous and the larger-than-life, but Diane Arbus instead wanted to bring light to the ordinary and the things that slipped under the radar.