“My favourite thing,” Diane Arbus once said, “is to go where I’ve never been.” As Arthur Lubow’s deeply researched, sometimes prurient, new biography of the artist attests, she was not just speaking about her photography. The book is punctuated by revelations about her private life, including the claim, based on her psychoanalyst’s notes, that she had a fitful but prolonged incestuous relationship with her beloved older brother, Howard, up until a few months before her death.

References to what Lubow calls Arbus’s “multivalent” sex life are scattered throughout Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, somewhat belying the book’s matter-of-fact title. We know from previous biographers – the scholarly Patricia Bosworth and the psychoanalytical William Todd Schultz – that Arbus’s transgressive art and life were intertwined to a complex degree: she sometimes had sex with some of the so-called “freaks” she photographed and once took part in an orgy when shooting a story on swingers. Lubow digs deeper, but without shedding much more light than either of his predecessors on her art or the deep discontentments that fuelled it.

Arbus did not view her “freaks” as freaks, but people who had been somehow elevated by being different

Born into considerable wealth, Arbus suffered all her life from the guilt of privilege. Her mother, Gertrude, was the heir to the family business, Russeks, a prestigious department store on 5th Avenue that sold furs. While Gertrude was detached to the point of cold, her husband, David Nemerov, was strict to the point of bullying. Both, as Lubow notes, “doled out approval, not love”. Gertrude’s single defining act of defiance towards her family was to fall for Nemerov while he was working as a window dresser at Russeks. Her daughter followed suit, marrying Allan Arbus, who worked in the company’s advertising department. They married when she was 18 and, soon afterwards, he gave her a camera as a present.

After pursuing a short, unhappy career as a fashion photographer in collaboration with her husband, she walked off a Vogue shoot, announcing, “I can’t do it any more. I’m not going to do it any more.” This rebellious incident, which Lubow calls Arbus’s “decisive moment”, is the starting point for his episodic narrative. It led to another key moment, an apprenticeship with Lisette Model, an older photographer, who later described the young woman who walked into her class for the first time in the late 1950s as looking like “she was just before or just after a nervous breakdown”. Model instructed her to photograph only what excited her. “I can’t photograph,” Arbus protested in one of many tearfully therapeutic episodes, “because what I photograph is evil.” Model replied that she needed to confront her anxiety or give up. “It was my business as a teacher to get it out.” Model later said: “What comes after that I am not responsible for morally.”

The early work of Diane Arbus – in pictures Read more

If Arbus’s instinct for the perverse was evident even in her early photographs, Model sharpened her gaze and the Diane Arbus we now know, and continue to be intrigued and disturbed by, emerged. She firmly believed that “there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them”, but, it is really her way of seeing them – the tension that exists in her images between the empathetic and the exploitative – that draws us in and, to a crucial degree, makes us complicit in her transgressive art. She photographed compulsively, searching out sideshow misfits, the mentally deficient and the obsessively exhibitionist, but also people she encountered on the street who caught her eye with their aura of otherness.

One such passing subject was the young Colin Wood, immortalised by her in a dramatic portrait entitled Child With a Toy Grenade in Central Park, in which he looks deranged while clutching his tiny replica bomb. Lubow tracked him down and found that he too was complicit in the myth Arbus had created for him: “She saw in me the frustration, the anger at my surroundings, the kid wanting to explode but can’t because he’s constrained by his background.” You could say that she saw in him her younger self. Except that, in all the other images in the contact sheet, he looks playful and engaged. The deceptive art of photography also allowed her to create images that complied with her neuroses: about life, about childhood, about outsiderness, physical and psychological.

Unlike many critics who expressed distaste for her work, Susan Sontag chief among them, Arbus did not view her “freaks” as freaks, but people who had been somehow elevated by being different. “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” she once remarked. “Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Her need to photograph them, and sometimes to sleep with them, speaks of a deeper desire to remake herself and to be accepted as a self-styled outsider by people who, from birth, did not have that choice. In her photographs, though, they remain to an unavoidable degree objects of our fascination, their otherness accentuated by flash, stark contrast and dramatic composition. They are also, despite or because of that, some of the most powerful photographic portraits ever made.

It was the New Documents exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967 that propelled Arbus into the public eye. Given a room of their own, her images ignited a media frenzy. Oddly, Lubow does not mention one of the most memorably telling details in Bosworth’s biography, namely that, at the end of every day, gallery staff had to clean the glass covering the photographs because members of the public had spat on them.

Four years later, on 26 July 1971, Diane Arbus took her own life by swallowing barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor blade. She was 48 and had perhaps exhausted her appetite for the strange and the sordid. Depression had stalked her throughout her life, draining her of confidence and creativity, so it may have been that she had also grown fatigued with herself and her neurotic demons. What emerges most forcefully from Lubov’s long portrait is not just the all-consuming nature of Diane Arbus’s dark creative vision, but what it cost to obsessively pursue and yet be so dissatisfied by its relentless demands.

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer is published by Jonathan Cape (£35). Click here to buy it for £28.70