Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967

The subtractive test runs quickly on two figures, and almost nothing yields. Take one twin and the work does not shrink, it vanishes: what it says is in the pair. Take the matching clothes and the likeness becomes resemblance; the dresses, collars, tights and headbands make two children one image and drive the eye to the faces, the one place where sameness fails. Take the frontal pose and the square and the comparison is spoiled. The hard, even light removes atmosphere so that nothing but the comparison is left. What yields: the pale ground and the cut at the shin are workable rather than compelled, and a frame from the same minutes with a different tilt of a head would be a lesser but recognisable version. Necessity is high, and of a small kind: one comparison, made exact.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What the picture brings into the open can be stated. Identity is not sameness: two persons who share a face, a dress and a haircut are shown in one instant to be two people, and the difference is located exactly where the culture of matching cannot reach it, in the mouth and the eyes. Second, the ordinary, a suburban child dressed for an occasion, held still and looked at squarely, is strange, and the strangeness was there before the camera. Third, the girls look back, and the viewer’s search for the difference becomes the subject. These are meanings, disclosed through the image entirely. What holds the axis below the gate is the size of the condition: one truth about the self and its double, stated precisely, not a social condition opened in its breadth, and part of the chill is mood the truth carries.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation of one kind, cold: the uncanny, a small dread arising from the ordinary. The figures are children in their best clothes, and the effect is nearer a shiver than grandeur; the eye moves from one face to the other and back, and each return deepens it rather than resolving it, a frequency within one frame that a single image seldom has. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve, and below the Universal Minimum, is height and range. No beauty is sought beyond the plain grace of the children; there is no transport and no scale; the even light and the flat ground refuse the photograph’s usual means of lift. Once the difference between the faces has been seen, the dread is understood rather than renewed. A lasting chill, not an elevation in the axis’s higher sense.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, because the subject is the archetype in the flesh. The double, the twin, the second self and the mirror are among the oldest patterns of story: the brothers who found a city, the second self who announces a death, the sister who is and is not oneself. The picture builds that pattern out of two particular children in New Jersey, and they stay particular: dresses, tights, a haircut of 1967, a mouth turned slightly down. The pair is the whole composition, and the one difference between them is the old knowledge that the double is never simply the same. The stillness carries the fairy tale’s enchanted children too. Held short of the gate because the archetype is held in one relation, likeness and its failure, and is stated with great exactness rather than unfolded.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the documentary and street photography of New York: Lisette Model, Arbus’s teacher, with her bodies seen close and without flattery; Weegee’s flash; Walker Evans’s frontal plainness; Robert Frank’s America seen askew. The departure, which belongs to Arbus’s work of the 1960s as a whole, is frontal, consenting confrontation: the subject faces the camera, knows it is being made into a picture, and returns the look; and ordinary people are looked at with the same attention as those the culture called freaks, so that the boundary between them is put in question. The stake was real: the work was attacked in her lifetime and after, Susan Sontag’s essay of 1973 the documented case. Held below 8.5 because the swerve is the body’s, made in many frames before 1967; this picture is its purest instance, not its turning.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. As a painting the two girls would be a commission or a caprice, and their likeness the painter’s doing; the photograph knows what it knows because it carries the claim that these two children stood there, so the difference between their faces is a fact of nature, not of art. As a moving image the difference would flicker and pass; the still holds the fraction of a second in which the twins diverge, and fixes it for scrutiny. The square holds them in balance; a horizontal frame would set them in a room, a vertical one would separate their heads. The even light makes the surface even, so the faces read as evidence. Held below the top because the form is the photograph’s common instrument used with perfect fitness, not one the work invents.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence over promise: fifty-nine years, through which the image has held, and the questions it sustains are still open. Is the picture cruel, or tender, or neither, and where does the photographer stand toward the children? Is the difference between the faces a truth about selfhood, or an accident of a moment that the camera made into a truth? What did the girls consent to, and what does it mean for two private children to become one of the century’s emblems of the uncanny? How far does the strangeness come from the viewer, primed by the maker’s name? Each return to the print begins the search for the difference again. Held below the top because the formal field is small, and much of the return is to the debate on Arbus and on the ethics of portrait photography, which the image carries for the body of work rather than by itself.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography of the 1960s and 1970s. Intrinsic force: the purest statement of a reorganisation of the portrait photograph, frontal, consenting, square, the ordinary made strange by attention; the reorganisation is the body’s, and this image is its emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the frontal and confronting portraits of Rineke Dijkstra and of Mary Ellen Mark, whose pictures of twins are an explicit later instance, and the portrait of the strange ordinary across the later century descend in part from Arbus’s body; and the two identical girls facing the camera in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) are asserted by critics as a debt to this image, a debt not documented in Kubrick’s words and credited with that discount. Fame lends nothing. Held below the gate because the redirection belongs to the body, and this image carries it as its sign.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at fifty-nine years. Form: whole. The image survives in the negative and in prints in many collections, and no loss of any part is known. Presence: among the widest a photograph has, continuous since 1972 in exhibition, monograph, teaching and reproduction, from the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that year to Diane Arbus: Revelations (2003 to 2006); much of that is fame, which is presence, not proof, and earns little. Fabric: gelatin silver on fibre paper, properly processed, is among the most durable photographic materials. A light charge for the prints made for the estate after the maker’s death, which raise the question of what the work is in a medium of copies; since the unit is the image, the charge is small. The axis stands highest of the twelve, short of the widest.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged as command of the photograph, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at its decisive point: the choice of instant, the fraction of a second in which the two faces diverge, and the choice of this frame among the others made that day, which is the photographer’s art and cannot be delegated. The frontal placement, the near central division and the distance at which both girls fill the square without crowding are exactly judged. The light removes shadow and atmosphere, as the work requires. The print in Arbus’s hand holds the dark dresses and the white collars apart without losing the faces. Held near 8 because the means are plain and few, one camera, one light, one pose, and the control is of choosing and placing more than of any range of making: the achievement lies in seeing what to take.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the matching costume, the most uniform thing in the picture, and the faces’ small divergence, the least uniform. They obey one law, the one the title states: likeness that the picture tests, and that at every scale passes and fails at once. The dresses match and differ by a fold; the headbands match and sit a little differently; the arms hang alike and not quite alike; the faces share every feature and do not share an expression. The composition obeys it too, a symmetry nearly kept. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and the light, the plain ground and the frontal pose serve it by removing anything else to look at. What holds the axis at 8 is that narrowness is not coherence: the law governs two figures and one relation, and its range, though fully held, is small.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The orders held are few, and integrated in one view. The self and its double, the axis of the picture. The family, by implication: two children dressed alike by someone, a wish for sameness visible in the clothes. Childhood, in its stillness and its public face. Society and its season, faintly, in the dress and haircut of a suburban occasion of 1967. Perception, in the viewer’s forced comparison. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history beyond the costume’s date, no nature, and no sacred order except as the old myth of the double reaches toward it. A single frame of two figures cannot hold more, and the figure describes the form; it sits a little above its floor because self, family and the act of looking are bound together in the one relation.

Score: 6.2 / 10