Diane Arbus

HUBERT'S FREAKS: THE RARE-BOOK DEALER, THE TIMES SQUARE TALKER, AND THE LOST PHOTOS OF DIANE ARBUS
By Gregory Gibson
Harcourt, 274 pages, $24

Gregory Gibson’s strange and excellent new book, Hubert’s Freaks, takes its title from the Times Square freak show where photographer Diane Arbus dredged up subjects in the 1950s. The Hubert’s Museum Mr. Gibson describes is at once charming and horrible, featuring a close-knit community of “born” and “made” freaks like a fire-eater, a snake charmer, a man with no arms and a resident black “savage,” Congo the Jungle Creep. Mr. Gibson interweaves his arresting history of Hubert’s—and, by extension, New York at midcentury—with the stories of photographer Diane Arbus, born wealthy on the Upper East Side, and Bob Langmuir, a neurotic rare-book collector who in 2003 bought an old archive of treasures and memorabilia from Hubert’s, unaware that it contained lost photos by Arbus.  read more »

Diane Arbus' estate has given the photographer's intimate, complete archives to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971, according to the New York Times.  read more »