ABOVE: detail from Diane Arbus’sA young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966. The photo is part of Diane Arbus: Revelations, which opens tomorrow at the Victoria & Albert.

The traveling Diane Arbus retrospective, “Revelations,” opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum on October 13, with more than 200 photos on display, plus things like contact sheets, letters, cameras, and other cluttery distractions. The British press have been ramping up to it, as the exhibit is apparently quite important, including photos from private collections that have never been shown publicly before.

But that’s not news: another day, another must-see show, blah blah blah. What we really wanted to show you was this darkly hilarious article by Germaine Greer in the Guardian over the weekend talking about being photographed by Arbus in 1971. The whole slapstick episode has Arbus straddling Greer on a hotel bed for several hours, in total silence, snapping the shutter every time Greer looked on the verge of a sneeze. Arbus was dead of suicide within weeks, a fact which Greer presents matter-of-factly on the page but which comes across a little like flattery, as if Germaine Greer was somehow Diane Arbus’s last straw.

LINK: The Guardian > Wrestling with Diane Arbus