WHERE THEY ARE NOW.(The Talk of the Town)(photography)

Populated by hundreds of nameless characters, Diane Arbus's portraits conjure infinite imaginary biographies. Ever since the Metropolitan Museum opened its retrospective of Arbus's photographs, in March, her subjects have been turning up to give their own versions of their lives, an occurrence that is as illuminating and curious as a man in a red turban surfacing at a Van Eyck exhibit. There's the peroxided wife, for instance, in "A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968," who has been in touch with the museum and is planning a visit. "Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962," is living up to his excitable reputation: numerous people have come forward, claiming to be the boy in the picture. "Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967," still dress alike, but their once black hair is permed and tinted strawberry blond. They've taken to haunting the galleries, answering questions and posing in front of the photograph that Arbus made when they were children.

"I often wonder how many of us there are," Lorna Anton, the subject of "A Young Waitress at a Nudist Camp, N.J., 1963," said recently, speaking from her home, in Pensacola, Florida. Anton's portrait--which shows her wearing nothing but a silver hairband and a starched white demi-apron--was taken at Sunshine Park, a preserve run by the American Sunbathing Association on more than a hundred acres of piney woods near the township of May's Landing. From 1961 to 1965, Anton and her parents and her younger brother lived there, in a double-wide trailer with a sign out front that her father had carved to depict four blue jays.

"Arbus came into the dining hall and had a soda," Anton recalled. "She asked if I had a break coming up, and I said, 'O.K.,' not thinking anything really, not that I was destined to be hallmarked as an icon. I was almost thirteen, just at that moment of change, when I was becoming a woman, and here was somebody who was actually very interesting and took an interest in me and wanted to have a photograph, and I thought, Well, O.K., that's cool."

It was July, a hot day, so the two walked outside. Lore has it that Arbus often went naked with her nudist subjects, but in Sunshine Park she did not do as the Sunshine Parkers did. (As Anton remembered it, Arbus remained in a tank top and shorts, escaping the sobriquet "cottontail.") "I said, 'Well, how do you want me?' "Anton recalled. "And she said, 'Just put your weight on your right leg and put your other leg forward a bit' "--a stance that, in the resulting image, emphasizes a nasty cut on Anton's front shin. "Then she said, 'Just kind of look over my shoulder,' which I did. She took maybe one or two shots, and then she said thank you and we smiled and off she went." The print that Arbus chose shows the dining hall and, in the ...