Prior to her suicide in 1971, Arbus had worked with society women, crying babies, nudists, people with developmental disabilities, people wearing masks, sex workers, twins, individuals with dwarfism, teenage couples, and people in transvestites. created a photo portrait of Or, as her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, put it: “freaks, professional transvestites, strong guys, guys with tattoos, very rich kids”. fits into the last category: this is a great photo of journalist Anderson Cooper as a baby, his sleeping face strangely resembling a death mask.)
The 1972-1973 Arbus show, at the time the most attended solo show in MoMA history, ran like a depth charge. First in the tenuous world of fine art photography (a controversial category at the time) and then across culture. Few people had heard of Arbus while she was alive. And suddenly, less than a year after she died at the age of 48, everyone knew about her, everyone had strong opinions, and perhaps most notably, the photo No one doubts that art can be art. “People passed through the exhibition as if they were queuing for communion.” MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski, who championed her work, once commented:
The Zwirner display is ingenious.this Enact an issue (a surplus of commentary, a controversial fire hose) and magically let it flow. As you walk into the gallery, you’ll see a wall covered with excerpts of writings about Arbus.
“Arbus’ work shows people pathetic, pitiful, terrifyingly disgusting, but without arousing any sympathetic feelings.”
“Her subjects are all flesh, and they have few resources. They don’t have many hearts.”
“[Arbus] Trapped in their physical and mental limits, they show us that their moves are a pointless charade. “
“Taking pictures of dwarfs doesn’t give you dignity or beauty. You become a dwarf.
and so on. The show coincides with the publication of the nearly 500-page book.Diane Arbus: DocumentHilton Kramer, Hilton Alz, Robert Hughes To Susan Sontag, Jermaine Greer When Janet Malcolm.
But the wall of letters is like a curtain, like a meniscus on the surface of the water. You cross the threshold to the show like a masked snorkeler on a stormy day with your head down. Suddenly you are in a new element, another universe. it is quiet. you are on your own No visible text, not even a title. It’s just a photo of you and Arbus, a gallery of her characters. Here are the same 113 photos of her that made up her MoMA retrospective 50 years ago.
A look at the 2022 exhibition highlights the luxury of many reactions to Arbus. It also provides a great opportunity to leave out the stupidity.
The debate that Arbus has generated over the past 50 years has always revolved around the issue of ‘freaks’. This question generally comes in the form of his two questions: Why was she drawn to these themes? And did she somehow betray, deceive, despise, or unfairly exploit them?
This seems to be the only thing that everyone wants to hear about her work.
Arbus’ subjects are, for example, Walker Evans and Robert FrankHer work is focused in such a way that you can clearly see that she is trying to tell you something. But her images of people who are institutionalized, physically abnormal, socially irregular, and otherwise marginalized are only part of her work. To understand her work, it is important to see it alongside all the other photographs.
Other photos showing high-status, low-profile men and women, and babies and children (who were too young to have meaningful status) are just as important as photos of so-called freaks. they are all related. And the emotions evoked by each image are inevitably replaced by others, and they become ideas that deepen as her photographs accumulate.
The idea is simple. It’s like a monkey at a tea party. all of us. Moreover, we are in denial. We skillfully adorn our self-image, but the very accessories (in the world of Arbus, leopard-skin pillbox hats, string of pearls, Halloween masks, tight jeans, tattoos, neat bourgeois interiors, can-cans) hats, bow ties, and even brazenly targeting nudity) continue to serve the game.
Bob Dylan once sang mockingly Leopard-skin pillbox hat “We balance it on our head like a mattress balances it on a bottle of wine.” It was nothing. They were strange, charming, and poignant.
Arbus abhorred sentimentality just as he abhorred no disgust or contempt. Her insight was not original in itself. Nevertheless, it deepened in her hands in a peculiar way. That she was a photographer, not a painter or sculptor, was crucial in expressing the idea that “everyone is a monkey at a tea party.”
Over the decades, we’ve been digging every corner of the camera. But the camera also reveals many facts. You can direct them to topics of interest, but they will remain indifferent. The reason we don’t want to see 9 out of 10 pictures of ourselves is not because those 9 of him are wrong, but because they reveal something we don’t want to admit.
We call it cruel precisely because cameras with special evidentiary power can make us look ridiculous. We are wary of the power of professional photographers. This can be imagined as a sort of rolling, unspoken negative assessment (“You don’t realize how stupid you are”). Unfortunately, we hope that photographers will collude with us to reverse the camera’s (as we see it) negative bias.
But Arbus acknowledged that cameras tend to reveal what’s really there. She found the phenomenon interesting. She didn’t try to exploit it for brutal rhetoric, nor did she try to turn it into a self-congratulatory orgy of empathy. She thought she had too many internal divisions in herself and others to believe in her “identity.”
Susan Sontag has set the agenda for all the wrong ideas about Arbus In a 1973 essay For the New York Review of Books, she did not like the advertised lack of empathy. I used it as a sort of passport to free my home.
But this tends to be the case. Passports do not “disappear” borders. They only allow you to cross them. We can say that Arbus abused his “passport” to immorality. But between our instincts and our inhibitions, which artist would not be interested in the gap between our private selves and the selves we present in public? He was one of the first to recognize revealing them in a unique way.
According to Sontag, Arbus created “a world where everyone is an alien and hopelessly marginalized.” But this is also off-base. Please have a look at the photo. Arbus describes various expressions of enthusiasm, companionship, parental tenderness, narcissism, keen intelligence, cynical fatigue, innocence, bathos, aggression, bewilderment, and curiosity (or boredom) about the photographic process. I caught
For Arbus, it all went crazy. And what made it so poignant was, in the end, to be Getting into the minds of the people she photographed, which she clearly wanted to do. Arbus was a complicated person. Melancholy, restless, and sexually adventurous, she craves her intense experience. But it was her complexity that allowed her to see and capture the complexity and agnosticity of her subjects.
Her success had a moral effect. That’s pretty clear to anyone who’s seen a photo of her today. Arbus’s transvestites and nudists, her people with Down syndrome, and Halloween celebrities no longer look like “weirdos.” They look like what they are: fellow humans. When we look at ourselves, we are able to look at subjects as honestly as possible. And we need not pity them more than we pity ourselves.
Cataclysm: Revisiting the 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Until October 22nd David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th St. Gallery, New York. davidzwirner.com/exhibitions.