Photograph © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Fifty years ago, a posthumous retrospective of a New York photographer broke attendance records for a one-person show at MOMA. Crowds lined up around the block to see a hundred and thirteen black-and-white pictures by Diane Arbus, a relative unknown whose brilliance was already an open secret among her peers. (Before she took her own life, in 1971, at the age of forty-eight, Arbus had few collectors, but they included Richard Avedon, Jasper Johns, and Mike Nichols.) The exhibition generated both rave reviews and hot takes; dissecting Susan Sontag’s scathing essay “Freak Show,” published in 1973, is now almost an academic subgenre unto itself. On Sept. 14, the Zwirner gallery, in collaboration with Fraenkel, in San Francisco, opens “Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited,” reuniting all the images from the exhibition (“Woman with a veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. 1968,” above, among them). It’s accompanied by the new publication “Diane Arbus: Documents,” a doorstop scrapbook that reproduces a half century’s worth of writing about an artist who, as Avedon once observed, “made the act of looking an act of such intelligence, that to look at so-called ordinary things is to become responsible for what you see.”