THE great and controversial American photographer Diane Arbus died in 1971, at the height of her career. She had specialised in photographing "freaks", producing images at once frightening, pitiful and, in their strange way, subversively beautiful. In the last couple of years of her life she worked on a project at residences for mentally retarded people.
The result was a new extension of her genius, in which, in the words of her daughter, Doon, she "may have found her most transcendent and consistently romantic vision". A selection of these last, haunting pictures are collected in Untitled, with an afterword by Doon Arbus (Thames & Hudson, £36 in UK). The photographs, reminiscent of the work of Atget, and, especially, of the paintings of Watteau, may on first sight appear shocking, but when one looks more closely one sees the depths of compassion and love that Arbus brought to the depiction of her wounded subjects, as well as her humour, her toughness, and above all, her sense of beauty.