(3 of 3)
For years Arbus had been subject to depression so severe she sometimes had trouble leaving her apartment. When she finally took her life, by swallowing barbiturates and slashing her wrists, she died in her bathtub, fully clothed. When her body was discovered days later, it was partially decomposed. But who understood better than she that the fully human condition has its grotesque dimension? And who had worked harder to prepare a field of understandings in which even misery could be understood as a subdepartment of dignity? "I really believe," she once wrote, "there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them." She was right.