‘I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.’

Diane Arbus

One of the most important and recognisable images within Diane Arbus’s oeuvre, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962, reflects a new chapter in her photographic practice as she switched from the 35mm Nikon camera to the twin‐lens Rolleiflex, which used a 2¼ x 2¼ inch film. The lower viewpoint of the Rolleiflex, which she used for this shot, allowed Arbus to maintain eye contact and interact with her subjects. Colin Wood, identified as the subject here, recalled, ‘I was not directed, but there was a collusion of some kind. There’s almost this “is this what you want?” feeling on my face.’

In 1962, the same year in which this photograph was taken, Arbus wrote to close friend Marvin Israel expressing ideas for a project she wished to pursue: ‘I wanna do the children the overprivileged ones…who are almost toomuchblessed [sic] as freaks.’ Wood was one such child. He came from a well‐off family on Park Avenue and was frequently abandoned to the care of nannies while his parents were in the midst of a divorce. By his own admission, Wood was a lonely and troubled child, deeply affected by his parents’ separation, exasperated and at odds with the world, as implied by Arbus’s original title Exasperated boy with toy hand grenade. As one of the first images Arbus created with the Rolleiflex, Child with a toy hand grenade represents a significant moment in her career – the birth of her signature aesthetic.

In 1964, Child with a toy hand grenade was one of only seven Arbus photographs acquired by John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was the first time her work had entered a museum collection. In MoMA’s 1967 landmark New Documents show, the only major exhibition of Arbus’s work during her lifetime, this image was one of 30 Arbus prints featured.