Transvestite on a couch, N.Y.C.

Among Arbus's many talents was the ability to engage with strangers on the street and soon find herself invited into their homes. Transvestite on a couch, N.Y.C. depicts one such individual Arbus met in 1966 and photographed several times thereafter. At a class she gave in 1971, Arbus related the story of meeting this subject and crossing a threshold from public to private realms:

I was riding my bicycle on Third Avenue and she was with a friend of hers. They were enormous, both of them, almost six feet tall, and fat. I thought they were big lesbians. They went into a diner and I followed them and asked if I could photograph them. They said, "Yes, tomorrow morning." Subsequently they were apparently arrested and they spent the night in jail being booked. So the next morning I got to their house around eleven and they were just coming up the stairs after me. The first thing they said was, "I think we should tell you" – I don't know why they felt so obligated – "we're men." I was very calm but I was really sort of pleased.

In Diane Arbus’s most significant lifetime exhibition, New Documents, a 1967 MoMA group show with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, she included two different photographs of the same person: Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C. 1966 (2007.518) and Transvestite on a couch, N.Y.C. 1966. Arbus made the portraits in the same setting around the same time and the two photographs provide a rare opportunity to explore her process and intentions. In Transvestite on a couch, Arbus presents her subject sprawled and tousled on a daybed, avoiding the artist's gaze. The same individual appears in Transvestite with a torn stocking comparatively engaged, even seductive. Together, the pair are a study in contrasts that reveals how complex and variable was the physical dynamic between the artist and her collaborators.