She was one of the most influential photographers of her time, though too often dismissed as a voyeur: a mere chronicler of freaks and misfits. In fact, Diane Arbus brought an unblinking, discerning eye to society's underside and to its pathetic, heroic, frightening, hilarious, all-too-human inhabitants. Judgment rarely marked her work; only an eagle's eye for composition and for the perfect moment -- as well as her sympathy for people she likely saw, oddly given her background, as fellow outsiders.

"I don't press the shutter," Arbus once noted. "The image does. And it's like being gently clobbered."

To anyone who began taking photography seriously in the 1950s and 60s, the name Diane Arbus signalled something new and strange and unsettling. She herself was not intimidating -- born Diane Nemerov in 1923, she was a short, dainty Jewish girl from a well-to-do Park Avenue family. Her parents owned a fashionable Manhattan shop called Russek's, dealing in furs.

An artistically gifted child, Diane grew up knowing wealth, nannies, foreign travel and the deference of strangers, which she hated. "I remember the special agony of walking down that centre aisle, feeling like the princess of Russek's: simultaneously privileged and doomed," she once wrote.

At Russek's Diane met a wiry young man with an intense gaze named Allan Arbus, who lead her into photography. Allan at the time worked in the advertising department of Russek's and became infatuated with Diane, then barely in her mid-teens. They married in 1941, when Diane was 18, and for years built a career as commercial, editorial and fashion photographers. Ultimately Diane chafed at being, in effect, Allan's stylist and glorified assistant, left the partnership and the marriage to pursue her own photography.

It was during this period that Diane flourished, though never prospered. Always suspicious, even dismissive, of her talents, she never could fully accept the fact that she was brilliant at what she did. Separated from her husband and thrust into the world without benefit of trust fund or financial portfolio from her parents, Diane nonetheless produced a masterly body of work and held herself together -- while raising two daughters, Amy and Doon.

Diane began shooting in 35mm and loved grainy imagery. Her study with the famed photographer Lisette Model transformed Diane almost instantaneously into a devotee of medium format. She favoured two cameras for much of her career: a twin-lens Rolleiflex or Mamiyaflex. She loved to shoot flash, even outdoors, the better to freeze an expression or to open up shadows.

But far more important than mere technique or equipment was Diane's ability to connect with her subjects. This was her genius; this was her art, and one reason why so much of the work by her imitators falls flat. Diane had the innate ability to know when not to shoot, when to get to know her subjects, be they street people, nudists, cross-dressers or movie stars, and to make them feel at ease before she made a picture.

"There's a quality of legend about freaks," Arbus said. "Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

When one thinks of Diane Arbus a few images come immediately to mind: The twin girls, the grimacing boy in short pants holding a toy hand grenade, the Jewish giant and his parents, the straw-hatted 'Bomb Hanoi' guy, an assortment of transvestites and so on.

In July 1971, Arbus committed suicide in Greenwich Village at the age of 48 by ingesting a large quantity of barbiturates and then cutting open her wrists. Rumours held that she photographed her suicide, but no photos were discovered by the police.

Compiled by Cultural correspondent