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The curator Sophie Hackett was standing near a carefully cooled vault in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, containing 522 of Diane Arbus’ photographs.
“I believe that it’s very, very difficult to talk about 20th-century art without talking about Diane Arbus smack in the middle of that,” Hackett said. “And I’m not just talking about the history of photography—I’m talking about art, period.”
Hackett led me towards a small number of Arbus pieces she had arranged for me to look at, all delicately slanted on a table, her eyes laying into them like Adam Sandler getting a look at precious stones in Uncut Gems.
In just a few days, the gallery would unveil Diane Arbus Photographs: 1956-1971. Cementing this as the second largest such collection of her photographs in the world, secured via a pool of private donors—second only after that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City—it is an exhibit that covers the gamut of an artist who famously made the mundane strange, and the strange, mundane.
The goal of the show, Hackett explained, was to keep as broad a curating focus as possible, while employing a rare chronological approach (showcasing Arbus in a way that shows her evolution as an artist). The show is bracketed between 1956, when the artist really dug into her craft—around the time she left the fashion photography business she ran with her husband—and 1971, the year she tragically took her own life.
“With a show,...