Throughout her career, photographer Diane Arbus focused her unsparing gaze on the unusual and eccentric. Sometimes these qualities were overtly visible in her subjects; more often she used her camera to ferret out the bizarre, strange, and occasionally violent currents beneath the placid veneer of postwar American life. Of this picture, she recounted, “They are a fascinating family. I think all families are creepy in a way.” The caption that accompanies this work, which shows only one of the couple’s three children, exudes a sense of disconnection, fantasy, and oblique grief: “The parents seem to be dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them.”