Abstract
Arbus is drawn to that which insistently makes most of her viewers uneasy again and again, as I can attest, having visited the current exhibit three times in the past month, in an effort to come to terms with my eyes meeting those hers have caught, her subjects, and through her own eyes, and through the lens-that objectifying medium about which we have come to know so much through the filter of the psychoanalytic ear. Striking to me is a sentence in older daughter Boon Arbus's afterword to the exhibition catalog where she speaks of her work as the administrator of her mother's estate; Arbus died in 1971. [...]for Arbus the moment that makes her queasy is the more classical canonical genre of the death mask, whether in stone, paint, or photograph-when she studies her father in his dying with her camera, that is, when she says she feels "almost like a creep" (p. 166).