This photograph was taken at the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey at the 30th Annual Diaper Derby contest. A competition for babies is typical of the kind of ritual or ceremony that Arbus had listed as her proposed subjects in her proposal for a Guggenheim grant in 1963. Arbus had earlier begun a project on ‘Winners’, writing in a 1962 notebook: "It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody." Arbus had decided to visit the Diaper Derby to photograph the winners and the losers. Here Arbus pushes her lens up close to her subject, filling the frame with the tear-stained face of the baby.