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Identical Twins is Diane Arbus’ most influential photograph from the post-war era. While the identical sisters wear the same dress and haircut, one frowns while the other smiles, highlighting the underlying tension between these subjects, that of individual identity versus extreme likeness. Arbus oeuvre revolves around issues of identity; she created intimate portraits of people she encountered and found intriguing for how they conveyed, expressed, embodied, and performed their identity.

Arbus frequently pinned up her prints, unframed, and handled them without much delicacy; for her, it was about what the image contained, rather than the print itself. Thus, many original prints, including this one, show signs of handling, and the corners feature pin-holes as a sign of display. Only 10 original prints of this image known to exist, and only four of them, including this one, were signed by Diane Arbus.

Diane Arbus (American, b.1923) was an American photographer best known for her intimate black-and-white portraits of people on the fringes of society, including the mentally ill, transgender people, and circus performers. Arbus was raised in a wealthy family, enabling her to pursue artistic interests from an early age. She first saw the photographs of Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, and Eugène Atget, while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery with her husband Allan Arbus in 1941. During the mid-1940s, the married couple began a commercial photography venture that contributed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Burned out on commercial work by the 1950s, Arbus began roaming the streets of New York with her camera, documenting the city through its citizens. These images were later shown alongside those of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “New Documents” (1967). Today, her works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.