The Diane Arbus show currently on show at the Met is an unusual show for a number of reasons. Most obviously and with no obvious consequence, its in the european painting section; secondly, because of an excess of contextualisation, text, and photographic reliqueries the viewer takes on the exhibition as if they are wandering through a catalogue - it is a very literary experience; thirdly and in no doubt because of the former, its the most thorough reconstruction of any artist's life that I've seen in an exhibition.

One of the obvious criticism's that the show opens itself to is succombing to the cult of the personality. It is filled with rooms that recreate her dark room and her 'library', and her note books are liberally quoted. However, what comes across is that Diane Arbus was obviously very intelligent; the stencilled quips are genuinely interesting and enlightening (including most of the usual Arbusisms); and although her life has a melodramatic form with the romantic artist's swan song in the form of suicide, there are good reasons for including her life and her self to such an extent in the work.

The typical criticism of her work is the cold, often facetious position that she takes regarding her subjects. Her subjects are usually from the periphery of society: including the typical freak shows, the retarded, naturists, transvestites but also - and less obviously a minority although undoubtably so - those burdened with an excesss of wealth. She also enjoyed the exact opposite in the forms of stereotypes from the majorities, often photographed in parks in NYC: young lovers, parents and so on. These subjects and the undoubted 'type casting' that she employed, explored or extracted out of her subjects has given her her ambiguous reputation. Protesters to this often refer to her empathy in her defence. They see less a cold critical eye than a deep love for humanity in all its variety, a bittersweet aperture which accepted and strove to testify to the bizarre fates that a silent majority live through.

What this exhibition contributes to this dialogue is an attempt to show through the broader extrinistic information that surrounds the corpus of her work in almost trying to exhibit Arbus herself through the library and private notebooks. This convinces us of her deeply empathic nature and viewpoint, occasionally countered by a sense of selfhood that seemed to swing from the self-aggrandising to depreciating. At times she truly felt she saw things that no one would, and on another occasion that when she found things they were completely unlike how others had described them, which is a very similar sentiment expressed from some fictional others' perspetives. It could be that the empathic part of her saw through the lens people's most inner weaknesses, reflecting her own, and her own human worries; and against this the sarcastic new yorker coldly portrayed the rich as ridiculous. The great problem with Arbus is locating the differences in the temperament to the images, for there is none in the images themselves.

The series of images of retarded people, looking patently abnormal and wearing hallowe'en masks is, in this way, key (a less ambiguous image and something more indicative). The images themselves are deeply ambivalent and provoke the viewer into taking up a clear position. They are images where it is difficult to maintain an open interpretation due to the loaded subject which encroaches on one of society's core roles through people who are simply unable to live independently and require our social animal self to assist them. To represent these people, who often have strange features and freakish gaits by nature, as masked and scuffling along is forcing the viewer to recognise a moral hot-spot in our acts of judgement or the act of judgement of other people and of society at large. But are these images cruel in their representations? The problem is that they are not cruel, but highlight the viewer's own feelings, forcing us to address ourselves. The images can be seen cruelly - as cheap, cold jokes at the expense of those to whom nature has rendered less able than most, or as a terrible empathy for these people, seeing the misfortune that we feel for them, that they don't feel for themselves, and who selflessly enjoy the spectacle of hallowe'en more than most. The denominator of meaning in these images is the compassion of the viewer to the subject (or lack thereof), and to Arbus's own worldview.

Arbus's images fail to direct the viewer leaving us open to complete the imagery with something as difficult and awful as making a decision. They fail to give us an answer which we can extract and hold aloft as 'her position'. Empathy is something quite extrinsic to the formal image, but incredibly binding to the content portrayed, yet this is her principle photographic method. Her position and method was to drag us into a world of consequence, leveraging empathy against us and quite cruelly staring at the viewer through her images and her subjects with a cold eye, and waiting for our response to them, waiting for us to show our humanity through our typically dispassionate eyes.

(Note: the show will be heading to the V&A later in the year.)