Diane Arbus was born Diane Nemerov in 1923 into the family that owned Russeks, a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue, and grew up on Central Park West so insulated from the Great Depression that her defining trauma was feeling too safe. This episode traces how that hunger for something real, sharpened by a decade producing glossy fashion editorials for Vogue, Glamour, and Seventeen with her husband Allan, drove her in 1956 to quit commercial work, number her own negatives, and study under Lisette Model.

We break down the technical choices that became her visual language: abandoning grainy 35mm for a medium format Rolleiflex held at the waist, which allowed direct eye contact with subjects, plus a flash fired even in daylight that exposed every pore and cheap suit. Those tools produced the Jewish giant Eddie Carmel hunched in his parents’ Bronx apartment and the identical twins from New Jersey, images that fractured the critical world after the 1967 MoMA show New Documents.

• Susan Sontag’s charge that Arbus lacked compassion versus Hilton Kramer’s defense of her radical empathy
• Why fine art prints sold for around 100 dollars and she was forced back into magazine work
• Her amicable separation from Allan and her relationship with art director Marvin Israel
• The depressive crashes, worsened by hepatitis, that ended with her death at Westbeth in July 1971
• The record-breaking 1972 MoMA retrospective, the Venice Biennale, and the twins in The Shining