The article examines the representation of people with cognitive and physical disabilities in two sets of photographs, (a) the commercial portraits of American and European show freaks from the 19th and early 20th century and (b) artistic images made by American photographer Diane Arbus between the 1950s and the 1970s.It refutes the accusation that these pictures reduce their models to, and sensationally display them as, passive objects, thus exacerbating the social exclusion of handicapped people in general. For quite apart from the fact that the disabled models were actively involved in the creation of their portraits, the relationship of disability and non-disability is reflected in the resulting photographs in a highly ambivalent manner. In both corpuses pictures reproducing the contradistinction between these terms are juxtaposed with images undermining it. Above all, however, both groups of photographs deconstruct the very norm of non-disability: the older ones by creatively redeveloping the human body, the more recent ones by absurdly doubling its monstrosity.