Unsettling appearances: Diane Arbus,Erving Goffman and the sociological eye

Situating Arbus

Any discussion of Arbus soon runs into the cliché of her as the ‘Sylvia Plath of photography’, leading a dark and mysterious life, that ended with her suicide in 1971 at the age of only 48. There is no doubt that her astonishing compositions are often read through a mythologized biography, but this ignores the complexity of her work and the bold ambitions she had for it. She was awarded Guggenheim fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for her project on ‘American Rites, Manners and Customs’, travelling across the country, photographing the people, places and events she described as ‘the considerable ceremonies of our present’. ‘These are our symptoms and our monuments’, she wrote in her grant application, explaining: ‘I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary’ (in Arbus et al., 2003: 41). ¹ It was a selected group of these photographs that were displayed in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 landmark exhibition in New York, entitled New Documents, which initially drew critical and popular attention to her work. But it is worth recalling that Arbus was one of three photographers chosen for the exhibition – Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand were the others – and while all three had very distinct visual styles, they were each reshaping the documentary form to pursue a more intimate and personal approach to America’s troubled social landscape. All three made use of strange juxtapositions to create a new visual understanding of the commonplace and the exhibition effectively anointed them as the leading photographers of their generation, seeing their work transition from magazine page to museum wall.

At that time, there was virtually no art market for photography, and magazine commissions provided an important means of earning a living, getting work published and establishing a reputation. Although celebrated photographers like Walker Evans (1938) and Robert Frank (1958) had been able to publish books of their work, in American Photographs and The Americans respectively, such projects were extremely rare, ‘galleries dealing in photographic prints were virtually nonexistent, grants were naturally hard to come by, and museums were still adhering to fairly rigid definitions of what constituted photographic art’ (Southall, 1984: 153–154). Consequently, commercial assignments existed alongside the more signature projects for which she is known today. Indeed, Arbus began her professional career in the 1940s with her then husband, Allan, as partner, in a successful photography business that specialized in fashion and advertising for magazines like Glamour, Seventeen and Vogue, in what today is recalled nostalgically as ‘the clean commercial style’ (Lee, 2003: 24); but by 1956 she stopped working on these shoots and began to study with the Austrian photographer Lisette Model, who became a major influence on her work and a professional ally up to her death in 1971.

Model had achieved acclaim initially for her ability to clandestinely capture the foibles of the rich and fashionable on the French Riviera shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and then later in the New York demi-monde where jazz musicians, vaudeville performers, cross-dressers and transsexuals feature among her subjects. In both style and content she anticipates territory Arbus would later explore and it is said she acquired from Model’s courses both a ‘hard-boiled audacity’ and a ‘courage to confront extremes in human situations’ (Marien, 2010: 351). These qualities were further sharpened through her admiration for the notorious tabloid photographer Weegee, and became a leading champion for his work (Crookston, 2005). Photographing New York in the 1930s and 1940s, Weegee’s world is one revelling in eccentricity, sensation and violence, where the city is ‘viewed as the site of the unexpected, the surreal and the brutal’ (Clarke, 1997: 85).

In the literature on Arbus both Model and Weegee are well-known influences, but a third photographer is also significant and informed the use of frontal composition in her portraiture. As her most vociferous critic put it:

What makes Arbus’s use of the frontal pose so arresting is that her subjects are often people one would not expect to surrender themselves so amiably and ingenuously for the camera. Thus, in Arbus’s photographs, frontality also implies in the most vivid way the subject’s cooperation. (Sontag, 1977: 38)

It is evident from her pictures that an interpersonal encounter of some significance has already occurred, so that far ‘from spying on freaks and pariahs, catching them unawares, the photographer has gotten to know them, reassured them – so that they posed for her as calmly and stiffly as any Victorian notable sat for a studio portrait’ (Sontag, 1977: 35). Yet in many of her portraits her style is far less formal and bears greater comparison with the techniques pioneered in Germany by August Sander between the world wars. His ambitious attempt to systematically take portraits of every occupational type in Germany, which was to be called People of the Twentieth Century, is a sustained attempt to situate an individual’s life within the broader, social context of their time and culture, where every detail in the picture is of significance. Each person he photographed, from ‘the bricklayer’s assistant to the notary to the circus hands to the Nazi soldier, is afforded the same staring, frontal portrait’ (Gross, 2012: 59). When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they attempted to destroy his work, because the images revealed that many of the German people did not have the facial features associated with the Aryan race. Moreover, the series included unemployed and disabled people – the very groups the Nazis would attempt to eliminate.

It has been argued that the complexities of the Weimar period are condensed in Sander’s archival project, and crucially he constructed his portraits according to social, rather than racial, types that differed from Nazi ideologies (Emerling, 2012: 147). Sander’s subjects are above all else defined by the ‘blunt facts of social and class standing’ created through a rigid hierarchy of social stratification and status distinction, so that what is often ‘regarded as Arbus’s inventiveness with her subject matter … is in fact a registration of how much she understood and took from Sander’s inventory of social types’ (Lee, 2003: 44). The fine balance between social observation and psychological insight rendered in most of his images is achieved through the careful arrangement of sitters and their surroundings, which was then unique and revealed ‘the extent to which we show rather than reveal a face in any public context’ (Clarke, 1997: 114, emphasis in original). The photographs are rich with sociological possibility and I now turn to a closer look at some examples of her work.

Social portraits

By the time Arbus began approaching magazine editors in the late 1950s over possible assignments important changes in American magazine culture were already underway. Many were radically rethinking their editorial and visual content, ushering in a period of innovation and experimentation, ‘inspired by the need for magazines to establish clear, exciting alternatives to the growing competition of television in the battle for an audience and advertising dollars’ (Southall, 1984: 155). Much of the commentary on Arbus has concentrated on her portraits of ‘freaks’, but this overlooks the ‘social panorama’ on display across her work, where pictures of ‘celebrities, artists, feminists, the wealthy, the middle class, the old, and the young’ all appear, but the seeming ‘lack of an organizational hierarchy’ means that ‘the transvestite in her seedy bedroom is captured in the same square format as the socialite in her ornate bourdoir’ (Gross, 2012: 17). Operating somewhere between controlled studio portraiture and the spontaneity of street photography, her pictures are always interested in artifices and social appearances:

The camera she had chosen, her later use of flash, and her deliberate compositions resembled the techniques of the studio photographer. Unlike the studio photographer, however, she did not invite her subjects to come to her: she went to them, to their neighborhoods, front yards, homes, hotel rooms. For the most part, her portraits were not simply about faces and their expressions. They were also about bodies, clothing, furniture, wallpaper – all the details and appurtenances of an individual’s identity. The merging of these disparate techniques seemed truly revolutionary at the time. (Southall, 1984: 159)

Many have suggested Arbus was especially interested in displaying the inner life of her subjects and their existential condition, but few have attempted to understand how this is achieved in any systematic way.

One crucial exception is Nigel Warburton’s (1992) brief but perceptive discussion of how Goffman’s (1969 [1959]) dramaturgical sociology can shed fresh light on Arbus’s work. Among Goffman’s key insights is the idea that the self is a social product, where human encounters are filled with the arts of ‘impression management’ and avoiding the unpleasantness of ‘discrepant roles’. Although his Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969 [1959]) is often criticized for offering ‘the view that we are all cynical actors performing instrumentally for personal gain’ (Manning, 1992: 8), Goffman’s argument is a much more subtle and dynamic account of symbolic interaction than such a characterization allows. A significant section of Presentation is entitled ‘Reality and contrivance’ and in it he takes time to set out a position explicitly against the idea that dramaturgical performances are intrinsically false, insincere, dishonest and manipulative. Rather, ‘we all act better than we know’ because our daily conduct derives not from a script, but from ‘a command of an idiom, a command that is exercised from moment to moment with little calculation or forethought’ (Goffman, 1969 [1959]: 80). Here Goffman is emphasizing that the presentation of self always involves an enacted performance, whether we are aware of it or not, and realized in social situations that are subject to normative controls.

Goffman moves beyond hackneyed notions of ‘putting on an act’ or ‘all the world’s a stage’ by stressing the importance played by the audiences to whom the performance is addressed, and that all ‘front-stage’ performances require a ‘back-stage’ (Burns, 1992: 112). This dichotomy is introduced at the outset, where he explains that the ‘expressiveness of the individual (and therefore his capacity to give impressions) appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression he gives, and the expression that he gives off’ (Goffman, 1969 [1959]: 14, emphasis in original). Arbus was highly attuned to this distinction between the information an actor deliberately intends and that which is inadvertently achieved in the performance. As she wrote, in words transcribed from a lecture and later published posthumously in the introduction of the monograph ² that remains the classic collection of her photography:

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. … Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. … Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it. (Arbus, 1972: 1–2)

The discrepancies between intention and effect, or what Goffman terms the disjuncture between the impressions we continually ‘give’ and those we actually ‘give off’ to audiences, are at the core of her work and the next section examines how this juxtaposition animates her compositions.

Between intention and effect

Among her most memorable images is Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp, N.J. 1963 (in Arbus et al., 2003: 253), taken as part of her unpublished series on ‘Notes on the Nudist Camp’; a draft of her article was later published in Magazine Work (Arbus and Israel, 1984: 68–69). Both the image and her accompanying text transform a scene of domestic harmony into a humorous debunking of the entire naturist enterprise. In the photograph a smiling, middle aged couple sit either side of a television set in a living room bathed in sunlight, both are completely naked except for the man, who is wearing slippers and the woman wears flip-flops. They appear to be completely at ease with the situation, and it is this image that Warburton (1992) analyses through Goffman’s dramaturgical approach. Initially he concentrates on their ‘intentionally presented selves’, noting how the man’s whole demeanour conveys the impression he wants to give, that is of someone communicating a complete lack of ‘shame about being seen to be naked’ (Warburton, 1992: 402–403). Or as another commentator has put it, the husband ‘seems quite comfortable to have his small, cigar-butt-shaped penis peeping jauntily from underneath his paunch’ (Gross, 2012: 83) and is meant to suggest the normality of the setting. Although the woman is less relaxed she cooperates with the desired definition of the situation, which is one of warm hospitality toward a stranger in their parlour, ³ where all the visual props of suburban domesticity are readily identified: net curtains, coffee tables, family photographs on top of the TV set, soft furnishings and so on.

Of course, the humour in the scene derives from how these banal details play off against the overall absurdity of the situation. The disjuncture between intention and effect is readily seen in the woman’s more awkward posture that strikes a discordant tone. As Warburton (1992: 403) puts it, her ‘eyes cannot quite return the stare of the lens’, while her ‘feet are placed awkwardly, her knees are close together, and her hands clasped protectively between her legs’, which works against the relaxed ease the couple are striving to project. On his closer analysis of the setting, the props also subtly undermine the performance – why would an uninhibited couple in a nudist colony require net curtains? The kitsch art hanging over the man’s head is of a nude pinup girl, the framed family snapshots appear to be of themselves, in full frontal naked poses, so that each detail adds further comic layers to the narrative unfolding in the picture. Warburton’s Goffmanesque approach can be applied to any number of Arbus’s images. In what follows I will extend it to an analysis of two images that were initially published in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1968 under the headline ‘Two American Families’ (in Arbus and Israel, 1984: 106–107), before deepening the approach through a closer look at Goffman’s sociology through an Arbus lens.

The first and smaller picture of the two, as it is reproduced in the magazine feature, is entitled A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 1966 and features a young working-class couple with two of their three children. Here the uneasy disjuncture is between how the parents strive to look like glamorous film stars, the young mother unsuccessfully attempts Elizabeth Taylor, while her husband reaches for James Dean, and their sadder realities. Their son stands between them, body contorted and mouth agape, prompting Arbus (in Arbus and Israel, 1984: 106–107) to write, he ‘is mentally retarded, and the family is undeniably close in a painful, heartrending way’. The picture is paired with a much larger photograph of A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968 and is one of her iconic images. It is a picture of ‘normals’, an affluent American family relaxing in their huge back garden. The father and mother sunbathe on lounge chairs in the foreground, while a child plays alone staring into a circular bathing pool.

It is a complex image and Arbus (in Arbus and Israel, 1984: 106–107) herself states, ‘I think it’s such an odd photograph, nearly Pinter like, but not quite … the parents seem to be dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them.’ As such the effect given off in the picture is a much bleaker and more troubled portrait of family life than that presented by the ‘Brooklyn family’. Every detail in it suggests isolation and distance. The man is tense, his head leans to the side away from his wife, his left hand shielding his gaze as if locked in private thought. The mother is also resting, eyes shut and self-absorbed, wearing make-up and a bikini. ⁴ A table divides the loungers, and their physical separation is made even more obvious in the Sunday Times Magazine layout, where the seam of the magazine further splits the image, visibly adding to the distance between them. It has been noted that the ‘setting is stylized … like a stage set’ and in Arthur Lubow’s reading (2016: 426) the ‘three characters play out their drama as the points of an Oedipal triangle: a sexually provocative mother, a potent, angry father, and at the apex, their young son in his abstracted universe’. The setting is crucial to the composition. Almost two-thirds of the picture are taken up with the well-manicured lawn, while the looming presence of tall trees at the back of the garden further heighten the ominous atmosphere. Items of play and pleasure are pushed to the borders, discarded and ignored – all the props echoing the family’s aloof detachment from one another. An image of domestic tranquillity becomes a ‘study of estrangement and loneliness which, in its compulsive effect, speaks about a whole culture’s condition’ (Clarke, 1997: 32).

This scrutinizing of specific details to reveal something more general about the human condition is very much the hallmark of Goffman’s sociology and it can be extended to his classic work of visual analysis in Gender Advertisements (Goffman, 1979 [1976]). Much of the book reproduces a large number of commercial advertisements and uses them as visual data. As the title suggests, the book addresses how gender relations are displayed in them and he explains they work by exploiting a specific set of social conventions:

The magical ability of the advertiser to use a few models and props to evoke a life-like scene of his [sic] own choosing is not primarily due to the art and technology of commercial photography; it is due primarily to those institutionalized arrangements in social life which allow strangers to glimpse the lives of persons they pass, and to the readiness of all of us to switch at any moment from dealing with the real world to participating in make-believe ones. (Goffman, 1979 [1976]: 23)

The analysis develops his previous work deploying dramaturgical metaphors to examine social interaction and he suggests that advertisements can be productively compared to stage scenes, where the ritual displays in them tell us much about gendered social relations in society at large. The book is organized to indicate the various ways gender inequalities are enacted through the sheer attention to detail. The section on the ‘ritualization of subordination’, for example, has an account of how ‘Women frequently, men very infrequently, are posed in a display of the “bashful knee bend” ’ (Goffman, 1979 [1976]: 45) and the accompanying array of visual evidence featuring this form of deferent gesture gives a social scientific understanding of how gender differences are expressed. It provides both a nuanced study of the gender politics displayed in print advertisements and an exploration of the interaction rituals governing conduct in everyday life.

He was not especially concerned with the commercial aspects of the images, but rather he examined the varying degrees to which photographs can and cannot be regarded as capturing some ‘real’ state of affairs, distinguishing between those intended for ‘public’ or ‘private’ viewing, and those which are ‘caught’ in ‘candid’ moments as opposed to those which are ‘arranged’ or ‘rigged’ in some ‘covertly contrived’ ways (Goffman, 1979 [1976]: 14). Of course, Arbus’s work spans these categories, but the key dynamic she shares with Goffman is the understanding of ritual and how it is a placement mechanism affirming the legitimacy (or otherwise) of our positioning in the social structure. Moreover, in all her photographs self-presentation is always ‘flawed’ in the sense that it always represents a shortfall of agency, a discrepancy between the efforts made to create a self and the failure of those efforts’ (Nelson, 2017: 137–138). A sustained theme running through Goffman’s sociology are the procedures people use to deal with the loss of a social role, such as in his very early paper ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’ (1952), which foreshadows ideas pursued across his writing. The title is taken from the language of confidence tricksters, where the ‘mark’ is their victim, and ‘cooling out’ describing the techniques sometimes necessary to calm the mark down having just conned the victim in order to reduce the risk of their informing the police. These arguments are developed in much of his writing where he explores the links between pretension and embarrassment, and the damage limitation procedures adopted across society, so that role transformations of various kinds are handled in ways that keep the show running. Not least, since we ‘are all potential marks, and therefore all liable, some time, to need cooling out’ (Burns, 1992: 14). Consequently, Goffman thought it was vital to not only study the impressions people give deliberately, but also that they give off unintentionally. And it is this tension that Arbus explores throughout her work, revealing the masks we try to wear and how they slip in our presentations of self.

Normal appearances

‘Normal Appearances’ is the final essay of Relations in Public and can be regarded as a distillation of Goffman’s (1971) various explorations of social interaction he had been pursuing over much of his career, but the title also gets to the heart of Arbus’s project – how her photographs evoke that troubling void between our inner self-perception and our outer public realities. The ‘pathos’ that arises is ‘not that of her subjects but that of the viewer’, for her ‘pictures are not about types of freaks but a cataloging of that communal secret of wanting to be “normal” and wanting to be accepted for who we are’ (Hirsch, 2017: 414). Violations of the self are a central theme in Goffman’s work and running through it are elaborate accounts of normalization as a powerful form of social control. If The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1969 [1959]) is concerned with the interactional dynamics of supposedly normal people in routine situations, then Stigma (Goffman, 1963b) concentrates on the interactional management of abnormal, discrediting and disfiguring characteristics of spoiled identities. Throughout his discussion of the normal and the stigmatized Goffman emphasizes they are interactional roles, and the problem of ‘passing’ in social situations lies at the core of Relations in Public (1971).

The normality and naturalness we find in everyday encounters always have to be contrived and he argues that while ‘normal appearances’, ‘typical appearances’ and ‘proper appearances’ are usually pretty much the same, ‘this agreement conceals the adaptive social processes that produced it and the inevitable possibility that the three appearances will not coincide’ (Goffman, 1971: 284). There is a strong Durkheimian focus here, on normative regulation and ritual codes, but there is no sense that doing the socially proper thing is actually the right thing to do. Reading Goffman through an Arbus lens opens up this fundamental point to broader scrutiny and adds considerable nuance to what Manning (1992: 44, emphasis in original) has termed ‘the two selves thesis’ in Goffman, where the individual is regarded ‘as a set of performance masks hiding a manipulative and cynical self’. Arbus’s images unsettle this metaphor of theatre and confidence trick by revealing just how much information is given off inadvertently, raising important questions over the extent to which the performer is aware of the performance and her ‘work taken as a whole tells a story about agency and its limitations’ (Nelson, 2017: 135). Even though Goffman (1969 [1959]: 244–245) initially maintained the individual can be divided into ‘two basic parts’ and insisted that the self is ‘a performed character … a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented’ (Goffman, 1969 [1959]: 245), he later characterizes the human self (again following Durkheim) in terms of a ‘kind of sacredness that is displayed and confirmed by symbolic acts’ (Goffman, 1967: 47).

In his extensive analyses of deference and demeanour Goffman demonstrates the binding ties the rules governing interaction produce, maintaining how ‘in many social encounters, individuals are in fact concerned with a ritual celebration of the individual and simultaneously with protection of this vulnerable self by way of interaction rituals’ (Jacobsen and Kristiansen, 2015: 115). The best illustration of this Durkheimian understanding of the sacredness of the human self, but applied in a modern secular setting, is Goffman’s memorable account of ‘civil inattention’, which he uses to describe the delicate, mutual courtesies strangers display on busy city streets or in confined spaces (such as elevators). As he put it:

What seems to be involved is that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design. (Goffman, 1963a: 84)

Goffman coins the term ‘body idiom’ to describe the shared conventions enabling us to make sense of one another through clothing, comportment, physical gestures, facial expressions and the like, which he distinguishes from the more well-known notion of body language. The information communicated in this way lacks the symbolic complexity of spoken or written language. Yet the significance of non-verbal communication in any social encounter is that it never ceases, for while ‘an individual can stop talking, he cannot stop communicating through body idiom; he must say either the right thing or the wrong thing. He cannot say nothing’ (Goffman, 1963a: 35). The Arbus images discussed in this article, and her work more generally, shed compelling light on such ‘situational proprieties’ and how such rules obliging us to ‘fit in’ can also be circumvented or defied (Goffman, 1963a: 42).

It has been said of her photography that no ‘matter how incongruous or awry an appearance may be at first glance, Arbus’s portrait treatment often conveys the integrity and self-possession of an individual’ (Goodwin, 2009: 157). This is an important point, for Goffman has been criticized for painting too bleak and unpleasant a picture of social interaction, where ‘sincerity becomes secondary to manipulation and appearances’ (Stein, 1991: 426). This is a view famously put by Alvin Gouldner (1970) where he denounces Goffman’s sociology as symptomatic of the crisis of the discipline in the 1960s, which he suggests is one really speaking to the new, college-educated middle class, aware of the irrationalities of modern life, but anxious to benefit from them through cynically ‘playing the system’. It is ‘a social “dramaturgy” in which appearances and not underlying essences are exalted’ (Gouldner, 1970: 378). As he puts it:

‘Pop art’ declares an end to the distinction between fine art and advertising, in much the same manner that dramaturgy obliterates the distinction between ‘real life’ and the theater. The ‘Mafia’ become businessmen; the police are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the rioters except by their uniforms; heterosexuality and homosexuality come to be viewed by some as akin to the difference between righthandedness and lefthandedness; the television program becomes the definition of reality. The antihero becomes the hero. Once established hierarchies of value and worth are shaken, and the sacred and profane are now mingled in grotesque juxtapositions. The new middle class seeks to cope with the attenuation of its conventional standards of utility and morality by retreating from both and by seeking to fix its perspective in aesthetic standards, in the appearances of things. (Gouldner, 1970: 390)

This is a lengthy passage, but what it manages to convey is the distinctive, deadpan sensibility that flourished in the 1960s and which he locates in Goffman. Indeed, he had earlier denounced the sociology of deviance as ‘glib’, for while it might be at ease in the ‘cool worlds’ of drug addicts, jazz musicians and mental health patients (among other ‘outsiders’) it amounted to little more than a ‘titillated attraction to the underdog’s exotic difference’ (Gouldner, 1973 [1968]: 37–38). This critique proved to be influential, but it is worth noting that Goffman (1963b: 167) himself was highly suspicious of the entire field and aware of the many contradictions in it, considering deviance a category created by sociologists mainly to give sociologists things to study.

It is also striking just how much of Gouldner’s combative reading of Goffman recalls Sontag’s (1977: 45) bitter assessment of Arbus, where ‘both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic’ across her work. If anything Arbus draws our attention to how these conventional distinctions are constituted, and Goffman is emphasizing the unavoidably performative character of social life. In both the notion of self is a fragile construction, but this does not imply a rejection of a possible inner authenticity. Instead they both share a concern with how we manage discrediting information about ourselves and the kind of conventions that sustain trust among strangers in modern, urban environments. This is not to suggest that people are inevitably manipulative actors or strategic game players – rather Arbus’s photography and Goffman’s sociology explore the tensions between appearance and reality. From the outset Goffman maintained a contrast between the tactical and the tactful, so that we not only take others into consideration but we show respectful consideration for others. This emphasis on ritual has its origins in Durkheim, who insisted that rituals build integrity and social solidarity among participants, yet Goffman’s innovation was to render it ‘relevant to the analysis of gatherings’ by demonstrating how ‘ritual is not simply about expressions of warm regard for the person’, but is a ‘variable property of social interaction’ (Smith, 2006: 50–51). Arbus’s method of making the familiar strange powerfully confronts our assumptions about the taken-for-granted nature of everyday life, while her ability to reveal the familiar within the extraordinary enlarges our understanding of ourselves and the interactional dynamics of excluded status.

Conclusion

In offering a consideration of Arbus and Goffman my aim has been to move ‘toward a more sensual integration of method, subject, and situation’ and remind us of a visual heritage ‘that is today all too often forgotten amidst the welter of surveys, statistical analysis, and big data’ (Ferrell, 2017: 51). They both draw attention to the logic of sameness and difference, unsettling the terrain of social identity. By reminding us that photographers’ preoccupations with outsiders, the abnormal, marginal and outcast have important parallels with how sociologists have sought to understand such conditions the suggestion is that their images provide rich resources for enlivening sociological concerns. In particular, one familiar complaint levelled against Goffman is the unduly episodic, fragmentary character of his scholarship – starting each book as if it were the first, rarely consolidating ideas or looking back and juggling concepts without building connections between them (Lofland, 1980). After his death in 1982 there have been attempts to order these meandering insights into a more coherent whole, something merely hinted at during his lifetime. By considering his sociology in tandem with Arbus’s photography we gain deeper understanding of how even the most private aspects of our lives are socially organized through interaction rituals and the powerful sense impressions they generate. Their respective projects take us closer to ‘the essentials of human conduct, and it is this crucial starting point that we as sociologists have simply overlooked or taken for granted for far too long’ (Chriss, 1995: 8). Although these words were written over 20 years ago, in a review essay largely devoted to Manning’s (1992) attempt to systematize Goffman’s microsociology, they remain a vital reminder of the fundamental questions the work continues to provoke and the rich resource it provides for the social sciences more generally.