Psychobiography asks the wrong question. It wants to know why Diane Arbus photographed freaks, outsiders, couples in their bedrooms, children with masks. It traces her choice of subjects to childhood, to her marriage, to depression. It treats the work as symptom and the life as cause. But Arbus's style—the frontal gaze, the square format, the even light, the repetition of certain formal decisions across wildly different subjects—suggests something else: that the "why" is not in the biography but in the structure of repetition itself.

Style as compulsion

Freud's repetition compulsion does not repeat in order to remember. It repeats because something was never properly registered, never symbolized. The same gesture returns, not as choice but as demand. Arbus's photographs repeat a set of formal constraints with remarkable consistency. The subject changes—a nudist family, a dominatrix, identical twins—but the frame, the distance, the quality of attention remains. To read this as style is to miss the psychoanalytic dimension. Style here functions like symptom: it is what the subject cannot not do. The repetition of form across content is the mark of something that exceeds intention.

Arbus and the problem of the face

Lacan writes that the face is a trap. We look for recognition, for the Other's gaze, and the face is where that exchange is staged. Arbus's subjects often face the camera directly. They offer themselves to be looked at. The photographs stage an encounter that psychobiography would explain by reference to Arbus's own desire for visibility, her identification with marginality. But to stop there is to reduce the work to confession. What if the repetition of the frontal pose—across so many bodies, so many faces—marks a question rather than an answer? What does the camera want? What does the look want? The consistency of the formal address suggests that these questions are structural, not biographical.

Against psychobiography

Psychobiography tends to flatten the artwork into evidence. It uses the life to explain the work, when the work might better be read as a site where the life—and the limits of life-narrative—are put at risk. Arbus's repetition of style does not tell us who she was. It shows us what returns when the subject of the gaze is at stake. To read her photographs through psychobiography is to miss the force of that repetition—the insistence of a form that will not vary, even as the world it frames does.

Sara Lopez writes on photography, psychoanalysis, and visual culture.