EXPOSURE TIME.(photographer Diane Arbus)(Biography)

The woman who will stop at nothing was a Fury, a bacchante, and a saint courting martyrdom long before she was a self-immolating modern artist. But she became a heroine in and of the nineteen-sixties, and by going too far she raised the bar of audacity for imagining how far a woman can go. The legends of Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin, and Diane Arbus all had their roots in that decade. They fed a hunger for narratives of suicidal transcendence that were particularly seductive to the young, perhaps because it takes a lifetime to accept that we have, and are confined to the solitude of, one body.

Idolatry is a form of vandalism that often inspires a violent counter-reaction of antipathy to the idol. Even before her death, in 1971, Arbus was exalted as a genius and reviled as a predator who conned her subjects out of their dignity. The judicious books that accompany two new shows give perspective to her intentions and, in the process, to her character. "Diane Arbus: Family Albums" (Yale; $35) is the catalogue of an exhibit curated by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz that is currently installed at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts. An informative short essay by Pultz focusses on specific work, and an erudite, longer one by Lee reconsiders Arbus's portraiture in the context of social and art history. The show takes its premise from a letter that Arbus wrote to Peter Crookston, an editor of the London Sunday Times Magazine, in 1968, announcing that she was embarking on a project whose working title was "Family Album." "All I have is . . . a sort of sweet lust for things I want in it," she told him. "Like picking flowers. Or Noah's ark. I can hardly bear to leave any animal out." The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art's sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: "I think all families are creepy in a way."

Freud thought families were creepy, too, and his essay "The Uncanny," from "On Creativity and the Unconscious," suggests why Arbus's portraits still have the power to disquiet, repel, fixate, or even enrage the beholder out of proportion to their formal content. The German for "uncanny"--the adjective used for horror stories--is unheimlich, the grammatical negation of heimlich, which is the word for "secret," while heim means "home." Freud concludes that a sensation of something uncanny occurs in civilized people when they are suddenly surprised by a home truth they have repressed--a primal fear or desire. Looking at Arbus's work, one has that visceral shock of the forbidden. It's creepy not because her subjects are handicapped, loony, hideous, bizarre, sad, or perverse (though most of them are) but because there is something fundamentally taboo about the way she bares their primitive substance without their seeming to know it. The beholder's shudder relates to the memory, conscious or not, of that ancient nightmare in which one walks through the school cafeteria besmirched by some human stain while thinking one is safely clothed. Our dignity depends upon continence in the broadest sense of the word, and Arbus's subjects leak their souls.

The other, much more ambitious Arbus show is a long-awaited retrospective that opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on October 25th. It is accompanied by an aptly titled compendium, "Diane Arbus: Revelations" (Random House; $100), which contains a critical appreciation by one of the curators, Sandra S. Phillips, and a technical discussion by the photographer Neil Selkirk, who has been the official printer of Arbus's work since her death. "Revelations" has a number of pictures, and variants of pictures, that have never been seen before, though none of the new material significantly alters one's impression of the oeuvre. The real revelation is contained in a chronology compiled by the curator Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, the artist's eldest daughter and her executor. Their narrative punctuates an eloquent assemblage of previously unpublished writings and images: notebook entries, snapshots, contact sheets, passages from letters ...