A mixture of shame and awe
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Fairy Tales for Grown-ups
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"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know." The words of Diane Arbus (1923-1971), the late American photographer who committed suicide, can be as controversial or enigmatic as her work.
Born into the well-heeled Nemerox family, who owned a Fifth Avenue women's clothing store, Arbus' interest in photography developed in her late teens. After marrying a store employee, Allan Arbus, at age 18, the Arbuses collaborated on a series of publicity photographs for her parents' store. The collaborations continued in work for Harper’s Bazaar, Show, Esquire, Glamour, The New York Times, and Vogue.
After studying under Berenice Abbot and subsequently Austrian documentary photographer Lisette Model, Arbus abandoned commercial work to pursue what she truly loved to do—portraiture.
Looking at these 35 prints is a strange experience after having known them for years in reproduction. Almost all of them are her "greatest hits", "Patriotic boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967," for instance. All the images are part of the National Gallery (NG)'s collection and were acquired after Arbus' death.
Arbus made one of the prints, the markedly surreal and doubtless oft-repeated scene, "A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968." On an expansive lawn hemmed in by tall trees, an upper middle-class couple recline on flowery padded deck chairs in the foreground, the man with a hand over his eyes. Fully made-up, with her platinum blonde hair ending in curls, the woman strikes a pose, while their son bends over a portable wading pool in the background. This is an image about alienation, estrangement and excess.
"She lived in a milieu that was very well-to-do," says Ann Thomas, Curator of Photographs at the NG. "Every day life wasn't really like that. She wanted to break out of that and meet people on their own terms. She was kind of producing images that were kind of anti-glamour (in her own work)."
Defying photographic conventions—using flash in daylight for example—Arbus' massive body of work has been analyzed from a number of perspectives. Interestingly however, some appear to have been deliberately neglected.
Popularly known for her images of people living on the margins of American society, critics tend to frown on such suggestions as stereotyping the Arbus canon. The idea is that although she did photograph identical twins, midgets, giants, mentally retarded people—"freaks" (Arbus' word)—it is the undeniable empathy between photographer and subject that should be focused on.
Lost in such attempts to curtail debate, are all the questions and issues around Arbus' very deliberate choice of such subjects. Can all her motivations have been exclusively "humanitarian" and "empathetic"? Are we to believe that someone of Arbus' calibre, with her knowledge of advertising and image-making, living in a time when iconoclasts were revered (the 60s), was naively unaware of things like shock value?
"It had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them," Arbus is quoted in the publication accompanying the exhibition. "I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legends about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Few doubt Arbus' legendary ability to recognize and record her subjects' humanity. However she also clearly recognized a professional opportunity to photograph people that by virtue of who they were, drew attention to the photographs as objects themselves.
Ultimately, she did use her subjects. Could her own growing knowledge of this fact have contributed to her final depression?
Ironically Arbus' revolutionary photographic style is now the mainstream. The direct, frontal portraiture style, emblematic in the advertising of corporations like Benneton, Calvin Klein, is now a cliché.
A comparison of her work with that of radical British photographer, Jo Spence (1934-1992) is fascinating. Separated by just over a decade, both were concerned with issues around identity and excavating its hidden origins and motivations. Both women worked in a male-dominated field. Both came out of commercial/advertising backgrounds and were passionate about their work. Spence crossed the line between photographer and subject by eventually making herself her primary subject whereas Arbus seems to have sought out people ever further and further removed from the world that she came from.
Arbus' words and images speak to her own inability to confront the dissonance between her world and the worlds of her subjects. Ironically, for the photographer known for "de-masking people", it is her world, identity and motivations that elude us below a series of masks of her own construction—her photographs.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2000
Born into the well-heeled Nemerox family, who owned a Fifth Avenue women's clothing store, Arbus' interest in photography developed in her late teens. After marrying a store employee, Allan Arbus, at age 18, the Arbuses collaborated on a series of publicity photographs for her parents' store. The collaborations continued in work for Harper’s Bazaar, Show, Esquire, Glamour, The New York Times, and Vogue.
After studying under Berenice Abbot and subsequently Austrian documentary photographer Lisette Model, Arbus abandoned commercial work to pursue what she truly loved to do—portraiture.
Looking at these 35 prints is a strange experience after having known them for years in reproduction. Almost all of them are her "greatest hits", "Patriotic boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967," for instance. All the images are part of the National Gallery (NG)'s collection and were acquired after Arbus' death.
Arbus made one of the prints, the markedly surreal and doubtless oft-repeated scene, "A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968." On an expansive lawn hemmed in by tall trees, an upper middle-class couple recline on flowery padded deck chairs in the foreground, the man with a hand over his eyes. Fully made-up, with her platinum blonde hair ending in curls, the woman strikes a pose, while their son bends over a portable wading pool in the background. This is an image about alienation, estrangement and excess.
"She lived in a milieu that was very well-to-do," says Ann Thomas, Curator of Photographs at the NG. "Every day life wasn't really like that. She wanted to break out of that and meet people on their own terms. She was kind of producing images that were kind of anti-glamour (in her own work)."
Defying photographic conventions—using flash in daylight for example—Arbus' massive body of work has been analyzed from a number of perspectives. Interestingly however, some appear to have been deliberately neglected.
Popularly known for her images of people living on the margins of American society, critics tend to frown on such suggestions as stereotyping the Arbus canon. The idea is that although she did photograph identical twins, midgets, giants, mentally retarded people—"freaks" (Arbus' word)—it is the undeniable empathy between photographer and subject that should be focused on.
Lost in such attempts to curtail debate, are all the questions and issues around Arbus' very deliberate choice of such subjects. Can all her motivations have been exclusively "humanitarian" and "empathetic"? Are we to believe that someone of Arbus' calibre, with her knowledge of advertising and image-making, living in a time when iconoclasts were revered (the 60s), was naively unaware of things like shock value?
"It had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them," Arbus is quoted in the publication accompanying the exhibition. "I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legends about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Few doubt Arbus' legendary ability to recognize and record her subjects' humanity. However she also clearly recognized a professional opportunity to photograph people that by virtue of who they were, drew attention to the photographs as objects themselves.
Ultimately, she did use her subjects. Could her own growing knowledge of this fact have contributed to her final depression?
Ironically Arbus' revolutionary photographic style is now the mainstream. The direct, frontal portraiture style, emblematic in the advertising of corporations like Benneton, Calvin Klein, is now a cliché.
A comparison of her work with that of radical British photographer, Jo Spence (1934-1992) is fascinating. Separated by just over a decade, both were concerned with issues around identity and excavating its hidden origins and motivations. Both women worked in a male-dominated field. Both came out of commercial/advertising backgrounds and were passionate about their work. Spence crossed the line between photographer and subject by eventually making herself her primary subject whereas Arbus seems to have sought out people ever further and further removed from the world that she came from.
Arbus' words and images speak to her own inability to confront the dissonance between her world and the worlds of her subjects. Ironically, for the photographer known for "de-masking people", it is her world, identity and motivations that elude us below a series of masks of her own construction—her photographs.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2000
