"[6][7] In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort.

[11] Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.

[13] In 1963 the Guggenheim Foundation awarded Arbus a fellowship for her proposal entitled, "American Rites, Manners and Customs".

The couple also continued to share a darkroom,[1]: 144  where Allan's studio assistants processed her negatives, and she printed her work.

[26] He was popularly known for his role as Dr. Sidney Freedman on the television show M*A*S*H.[21] Before his move to California, Allan set up her darkroom,[1]: 198  and they thereafter maintained a long correspondence.

The Arbuses' interests in photography led them, in 1941, to visit the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and learn about the photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugène Atget.

[34] Edward Steichen's noted 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, did include a photograph by the Arbuses of a father and son reading a newspaper.

The idea of personal identity as socially constructed is one that Arbus came back to, whether it be performers, women and men wearing makeup, or a literal mask obstructing one's face.

Critics have speculated that the choices in her subjects reflected her own identity issues, for she said that the only thing she suffered from as a child was never having felt adversity.

She is often praised for her sympathy for these subjects, a quality which is not immediately understood through the images themselves, but through her writing and the testimonies of the men and women she portrayed.

In 1969 a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay, commissioned Arbus to photograph a family Christmas gathering.

[45] During her career, Arbus photographed Mae West, Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Nelson, Bennett Cerf, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Norman Mailer, Jayne Mansfield, Eugene McCarthy, billionaire H. L. Hunt, Gloria Vanderbilt's baby Anderson Cooper, Coretta Scott King, and Marguerite Oswald (Lee Harvey Oswald's mother).

[12][48] Late in her career, the Metropolitan Museum of Art indicated to her that they would buy three of her photographs for $75 each, but citing a lack of funds, purchased only two.

"[53] She was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum and "Leider's admission of Arbus into this critical bastion of late modernism was instrumental in shifting the perception of photography and ushering its acceptance into the realm of 'serious' art.

"[14]: 51 The first major exhibition of her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in the influential[54] New Documents (1967) alongside the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski.

[55][56] New Documents, which drew almost 250,000 visitors[57] demonstrated Arbus's interest in what Szarkowski referred to as society's "frailties"[35] and presented what he described as "a new generation of documentary photographers...whose aim has been not to reform life but to know it",[55] described elsewhere as "photography that emphasized the pathos and conflicts of modern life presented without editorializing or sentimentalizing but with a critical, observant eye".

[60] The Smithsonian American Art Museum housed an exclusive exhibit from April 6, 2018, to January 27, 2019, that featured one of Arbus' portfolios, A box of ten photographs.

Partly what happens though is I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things or think about what I want to do and get all breathless with excitement and then quite suddenly either through tiredness or a disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes, leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very things I thought I was so eager for!

On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in New York City, Arbus died by suicide by ingesting barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor.

[4][6] Photographer Joel Meyerowitz told journalist Arthur Lubow, "If she was doing the kind of work she was doing and photography wasn't enough to keep her alive, what hope did we have?

"[25] "[Arbus's] work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was", wrote the art critic Robert Hughes in a November 1972 issue of Time magazine.

[61] She has been called "a seminal figure in modern-day photography and an influence on three generations of photographers"[3] and is widely considered to be among the most influential artists of the last century.

[62][12][63] When the film The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released to cinemas worldwide in 1980 and became hugely successful, millions of moviegoers experienced Diane Arbus' legacy without realizing it.

[64] Chen goes on to reveal, "Not only did Vitali videotape and interview 5,000 kids to find [the right child actor to portray] Jack Nicholson's [character's] son, Danny, he was also responsible for discovering the creepy twin sisters on the final day of auditions.

A 2005 article called the estate's allowing the British press to reproduce only fifteen photographs an attempt to "control criticism and debate".

[4][34] In 2011, a review in The Guardian of An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus by William Todd Schultz references "...the famously controlling Arbus estate who, as Schultz put it recently, 'seem to have this idea, which I disagree with, that any attempt to interpret the art diminishes the art.

[14]: 51–52 [15][71] The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective curated by John Szarkowski of Arbus's work in late 1972 that subsequently traveled around the United States and Canada through 1975;[72] it was estimated that over seven million people saw the exhibition.

Bosworth reportedly "received no help from Arbus's daughters, or from their father, or from two of her closest and most prescient friends, Avedon and ... Marvin Israel".

[23][20][48] By "making substantial public excerpts from Arbus's letters, diaries and notebooks" the exhibition and book "undertook to claim the center-ground on the basic facts relating to the artist's life and death".

[81][82] The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased twenty of Arbus' photographs (valued at millions of dollars) and received Arbus' archives, which included hundreds of early and unique photographs, and negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film, as a gift from her estate in 2007.