The image is hard to ignore: a distracted dwarf wedged awkwardly between the legs of a Moulin Rouge dancer.

The pose could be from a Belle Epoque painting, but the photograph is strangely difficult to pin down. The subjects are in 19th-century dress, but are obviously in front of a 20th-century building.

Perhaps the metal grating gives the setting away: a sidewalk in New York.

The image is from the latest book by Amy Arbus, the daughter of celebrated late photographer Diane Arbus, who has spent years photographing actors in New York's theatre district — with some deeply intriguing results.

'The Fourth Wall' explores what Arbus describes as the "bizarre disconnect" of actors, many in period costume, being photographed in modern settings — often just outside Broadway theaters between matinee and evening shows.

Among the actors featured in the book and in a photography exhibition currently on at New York's Lincoln Centre, are such familiar faces as John Malkovich, Liev Schreiber, Matthew Broderick and Ed Harris.

Where fiction and reality collide

"I love the idea of the imaginary place where fiction and reality collide," Arbus told AFP in a recent interview.

The book's title, she explains, comes from the term for the imaginary wall between stage and theatre that audiences ignore as part of their willing suspension of disbelief.

"I'm playing with the idea of the fictional character and the real person of the actor seeping through," says Arbus. "Most of them I was trying to blur the lines between whether that actor was actually that character or themselves."

She loves movie stars as much as the next person, Arbus explains, "but it really wasn't about movie stars at all. It was who was doing the best job of convincing me that they were someone else and also that the character in some way was believable.

"I'm interested in the character more than the actor themselves," Arbus insists. Focusing on their roles, she adds, allows actors to feel comfortable in front of the camera while not necessarily looking their best.

"They don't have quite the same self-consciousness as they would if they were having a picture taken as the actor that they truly are."

Shifting time

She says the photographs are more sophisticated than her earlier work, in which Arbus would capture New York street life with a 35mm camera, and were instead taken with a medium-format camera requiring much more preparation.

"I love the idea that they often look like I could have just run into them," she says, while confiding "it's an enormous production to make these things happen. They are made often to look impromptu but there's a lot of arranging."

Part of the allure of Arbus' latest work is the disconcerting sense of shifting time that arises from contrasting characters and settings.

"Period clothes are my favourite because there's an inherent time travel in my work anyway and the period clothes just enhance that," Arbus explains. "You wouldn't know the time or the place."

Arbus says her interest in the theatre owes much to her upbringing — her father is actor Allan Arbus.

Other influences she cites include photographer Richard Avedon, with whom she first worked in 1992, as well as cinematic legends Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin.

The shadow of her mother

Becoming a photographer, initially working for New York's Village Voice newspaper in the 1980s photographing people such as an up-and-coming Madonna, gave her access to a fascinating world.

"It gave me license to get over my shyness with people and have an excuse to make friends with people I would never have access to and go home with them into their houses and see how they lived."

But finding her own voice as a photographer under the massive shadow of her mother — who committed suicide in 1971 — was initially very hard.

"I never intended to be a photographer and I became one long after my mum died. So although I was quite aware of following in her footsteps, it wasn't really a choice, it was the thing I knew I was good at," she says.

"Of course people would say 'you're not as good as your mother' and I just thought that was pretty unfair," Arbus recalls.

"The bottom line is that nobody is as good as my mother," she says with a laugh that seems half levity and half melancholy.

At the age of 53, she feels she has at last found her place. "This work to me is really mine, finally. I feel like it took me a long time to find my voice and I finally did."

"If somebody says 'your work looks like your mum's,' then of course I'm flattered. Who wouldn't be?" she says, again with a distant sadness.

"I'd love her to see the pictures. And I would love to know what she thought."

AFP