THE WOMAN WHO INFLUENCED DIANE ARBUS'S EYE

The legendary photographer’s revealing images—and her confidence behind the camera—were shaped by her mentor and close friend, Lisette Model

WHEN DIANE ARBUS, despondent and fragile-seeming, arrived at Lisette Model’s class in Greenwich Village in 1956, she had recently exited a decade-long partnership with her husband in fashion photography. It was an enterprise she loathed. Generating concepts and styling the models before Allan Arbus clicked the shutter, she felt she was being paid not to reveal the truth but to conceal it. Over the next decade and a half, practicing on her own, Diane would produce photographs that uncovered relationships, pretenses, dreams and delusions—secrets that were invisible to the ordinary eye. These images established her as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.