This photograph was included in the important ‘New Documents’ exhibition that the influential photography curator, John Szarkowski, curated at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1967. It presented the work of Diane Arbus alongside that of two other important documentary photographers, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Szarkowski selected these three as examples of "photographers [who have] directed the documentary approach towards more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it". This tightly cropped portrait is a classic example of Arbus’s confrontational style of portraiture and featured alongside similar portraits like 'A Young Man in Curlers (1966)', and some of her most famous photographs, such as 'Child with a Toy Hand Grenade (1962)'.