The Diane Arbus retrospective at the Met is enveloping–six or seven rooms of devastating portrature and tablets, scribbled notepads, letters, resumes, pleas to the Guggenheim. On the long guest list for one of her openings, she’d typed names and demarked each with short descriptors in green pen: Mr. And Mrs. Leonard Bernstein are tagged as “famous,” another man is a “playboy,” another is “a giant I hope to photograph.” (She apologizes for the length of the list, signing: “I’m not being greedy. I just want it to be a good party. D”) Arbus was as eloquent a writer as she was a photographer. In a letter to Marvin Israel, she writes that she sees herself in mirrors, all the time, and earlier that week she’d “peered across my stomach and smiled rather inappropriately at my gynocologist”–like she’d cast herself in one of her own photographs.
I take issue with the prevailing Sontag-borne notion of Arbus as exploiter and nihilist, even Arbus as cruel empath, seer of the unseen, bridger of worlds between “freaks” and normalcy. What’s obvious is that she is compelled by these people because she IS these people, or more importantly, who she imagines them to be: lonely peers in her quest for emotional camraderie, or reinforcement. A complicated collision of bleakness and beauty, as ever. Sontag beefs that the isolation in the photos is apolitical, but I think isolation can be a politicizing force; she also says that Arbus’ photos desensitize us to difference and impart a false sense of reality, which is mostly true of Arbus followers/misconstruers who get all up in the Vice mag, but I think it underestimates her incredible compassion and personal investment.
I guess that’s calling Arbus a kind of solipsist, but then, what suicide casualty isn’t?
Arbus killed herself at 48, in 1971–a grave act at any age, but at 48, one which seems much more determinate–and it was of course forecast by her final, most complex work: severely mentally disabled women wearing masks, captured in implied innocence, vulnerability and as follows, freedom. That’s not insincere, thats a blinding state of being. It’s still her self-portrait that’s most haunting to me, the famous one of her a year before her suicide, surrounded by pin-ups of her own photographs and newspaper cut-outs (one of which is an AP photo of a woman fugitive crying near her husband, who’s just been fatally wounded by cops), her hair cropped and staring, empty and exhausted, into the camera. She shares the same weary, distant expression as many of her subjects, a moment of complete alienation and total humanity, and it’s clear that for all her giants, midgets, hoods and trannies, Diane Arbus was only ever photographing herself.
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Hey J –
Nice take on Arbus. Portland has “Family Albums,” a considerably lesser Arbus show on view right now, so I’ve been thinking about her lately and reconsidering some collegiate opinions on the Iconic One.
I have to imagine that it was thrilling when Arbus first showed at MoMA. It was a wonderful break in the history of photography – her emphasis on the grotesque and abject, as well as her static compositions and hard, frontal lighting. I mean, Ansel Adams was still active when she was doing her best work.
I also believe that she was a deeply empathetic person, and as she matured, saw America changing radically with the sharp rise of freeway culture, post-war commercialism and boosterism, and the burgeoning suburb boom. Individuality gave way to the model family, save for archetypal, chest-thumbing Ab-Exer’s. As I work in a soulless yuppie restaurant at the moment, I silently squeal for joy when a dreadlocked, flamboyantly dressed, or otherwise ‘deviant” soul wanders into the restaurant. I imagine Arbus felt this on a macro scale and used the camera as an excuse and all-access pass to visit America’s vanishing underbelly (she being from an uppercrust family).
That being said, I think she was a very uneven photographer with good sensibilities and amazingly poor technical skill. The show here in town has several of her contact sheets on view, and it’s amazing that any printer was able to pull good photographs from the underexposed, sloppy negatives. There was a photo of a midget actor that I had never seen before (not the tough Latino with a cigar) – I would have sent any student back to the drawing board with that unacceptable result. (This was no Robert Frank rule-breaking Modernist conceit. This was “yikes, this is bad”).
I also believe that if you cull her total strong images (publishers and book editors love to clutter her work up), they are relatively few. She didn’t leave behind a terribly strong, prolific ouevre. That’s one reason in the mid-90’s the estate “discovered” the mentally disabled series, chose their favorites, and published them. That series struck me as exploitative, sensational, and not very good in any artistic sense.
OK, I’m cluttering up your comment thingy here and I have my own forum to write this stuff. I have the Arbus bio bedside but have not cracked it yet. Her work was interesting, her work was major, her work was flawed. But she definitely changed the game. Peace out,
Chas
I agree with you and am grateful you were able to write what I was thinking (well similar sentiments) so clearly.
And I was glad to be able to see this exhibit a second time, and in New York.