Diane Arbus, Photography of the Everyday or Pictures for the Freak Show - Literature review Example

Running Head: Diane Arbus, photography Of the everyday Diane Arbus, photography of the everyday or pictures for the freak show of thewriter] [Name of the institution] Diane Arbus, photography of the everyday or pictures for the freak show While it is the natural shimmering beauty f the daguerreotype that carries us through "The Dawn f Photography" and makes magic f such curiosities as a photomicrograph f a drop f frog's blood, the show also includes more than a few works in which artistry gives way to artiness. When Humbert de Molard sets up an elaborate sickbed scene, or when an anonymous photographer poses a boy so as to recall the cosiness f de Hooch's Dutch interiors, it is easy to see how an attempt to mimic painting can transform the photograph's verisimilitude into a cheap-shot magic trick. What is far more difficult to grasp from the work included in "The Dawn f Photography" is that the very frankness f photography can also inspire a whole other kind f artistic posturing. For if directness is photography's glory, it is also liable to be manipulated, used as a sort f all-purpose rhetorical device, until frankness itself becomes a form f obfuscation or artiness--which is a fair description, I think, f the work f Diane Arbus. Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age f forty-eight, is widely admired as a truth-teller, and if the initial reactions to the new book, Diane Arbus: Revelations, are any indication, the woman and her work are exerting as strong an attraction today as they did at the time f the posthumous retrospective at the Museum f Modern Art in 1972. Arbus's warts-and-all photographs, which are at once exposes and benedictions, create just the right kind f psychological havoc for a public that is all too willing to believe that any image that disturbs your equanimity is emotionally authentic, and that the greatest works f art are the ones that leave you wondering if you are yourself emotionally authentic. The public all too easily confuses hyperbole with honesty, and Arbus, who is intent on telling us how awful everything is, is a master f the highfalutin creep-out. In a series f photographs f older women on the streets f New York, Arbus seems to suggest that these ladies, who quite clearly take considerable pride in looking their best, are in fact ghouls; she gives such a sharp-eyed attention to their elaborately made-up faces and carefully arranged clothes that they begin to resemble the transvestites in whom Arbus also took an interest. The very eagerness with which Arbus's ladies out for an afternoon pose for the camera becomes a measure f their self-delusion. What's missing is the delicacy that Brassai (whose work Arbus admired) brought to his famous photograph f an old whore, swathed in cheap jewellery, seated in a caf. Brassa reminds us that, for all her haggard theatricality, this wreck f a woman is still the proud possessor f a pair f beautiful, velvety eyes. Arbus uses the fixity f the image to deny people their freedom--and in so doing she also denies them their self-esteem. She undermines the young as well as the old, the pretty as well as the ugly. Often photographed front and centre, in a dull symmetry, even her most sexually intriguing subjects seem wilted, marooned. Nobody ever looks their best, which is meant as some sort f revelation. Arbus is one f those devious bohemians who celebrate other people's eccentricities and are all the while aggrandizing their own narcissistically pessimistic view f the world. In a letter from 1968, Arbus observes that "all families are creepy in a way," and f course we know what she means. There is a solipsistic element to family life, a comfortableness in the way that husbands and wives and children interact that can at times feel almost sordid. When Arbus photographs an upscale suburban family relaxing in their backyard, she seems to want us to believe that the husband's and the wife's desire to present themselves as an attractive, sexy couple hides some terrible secret. But the only secret that is revealed is the secret f Arbus's own snobbery. She is the New York Jewish intellectual who treats these polished bourgeois as if they were fascinating freaks in her personal sideshow. While it has often been observed that Arbus's documentary manner owes much to August Sander, we must not forget that Sander brought the same equitable eye to all people, beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, wise and foolish, so that when his work is seen in bulk, as it was meant to be, the spirit is one f democratic optimism. Arbus stacks the deck through her insistent focus on people who are mad or odd or marginal, and that is her privilege as an artist. What I find unacceptable is that she leaves it to us to sort out the meanings. Arbus may not always have known what she wanted from her subjects, but she always knew how to give her confusions a fashionably ambiguous tone. In her letters Arbus describes visits to a school for the retarded in New Jersey, where she found the subjects f some f her last photographs, and you feel the warmth f her attention to these people--indeed, the problem may be that she makes too much f her own interest. Her attentiveness becomes an ego trip. She is Saint Diane, tending her flock. She makes a very telling comment in the midst f a technical discussion f her method f mixing strobe and daylight to create certain bright yet grayed-down effects. "I am like someone who gets excellent glasses because f a slight defect in eyesight," she writes, "and puts Vaseline on them to make it look more like he normally sees." She is always cultivating equivocation; she is always razzing the honesty f photography. And even as she rages against the coolness f the medium, she is wrapping herself in photography's inherent earnestness. The photographs are an emotional tease. Nowadays the very concept f artistic responsibility is seen by some as oppressive, and the result is that Arbus gets away with suggesting that the world made her do it. Arbus pioneered a sort f passive-aggressive attitude that flourishes among contemporary photographers who shove what they regard as challenging subject matter in our faces and leave it floating there. One young photographer who is receiving a good deal f attention this fall is Katy Grannan, who finds the men and women who are the subjects f her work by placing ads in newspapers for models willing to pose in the nude. Grannan had two shows this fall--at the Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94--and the effect is indeterminacy incarnate, whether she is photographing her amateur bathing beauties and overweight kids in colour in pretty rural settings, which gives the large-scale images a disconcerting sweetness, or in black and white in claustrophobic interiors. Grannan's subjects are all obviously glad to have us see what they look like with nothing on, and f course we take a look. While Grannan exercises a certain amount f control over these experiments in the banality f voyeurism, I am unable to locate a scrap f significance in photographic mood pieces that are one part pulchritude and one part ennui. Grannan's work would have easily fit into the International Center f Photography's "Strangers," which has its share f photographers, like Rineke Dijkstra and Collier Schorr, who play a sort f bait-and-switch game with their frequently young and attractive subjects, presenting them as visual candy and as something else--as illustrations f a theory about gender or race or class, a theory that is nowadays presented with a certain post-political listlessness. If there is something more to "Strangers" than this hipster morality, it is that there is an inherent fascination to photographs that from time to time eludes even the best laid plans f the forty photographers and video artists whose work is on display. Justine Kurland's pictures f men and women who live on contemporary communes are not much more than impressively stage-managed magazine illustrations, and yet her cast f characters are a fascinating bunch. I had mixed responses to Shizuka Yokomizo's photographs f people seen though the windows f their apartments. Yokomizo sends letters to the occupants f these first-floor apartments in which she explains that she will appear outside a certain window at a certain time, and her subjects are the people who actually decide to respond to her bizarre solicitations. The idea is a slim contrivance, and yet which f us has not looked into windows, wondering at what goes on in there Yokomizo's photographs are trivial, guilty fun--Rear Window without Hitchcock, Kelly, or Stewart. But elsewhere in "Strangers" there is something embarrassing about the cleverness with which serious subjects are turned into neat, gallery-friendly packages. I strongly object to the aestheticizing f political dissent in Efrat Shvily's series f black and white images, "New Homes in Israel and the Occupied Territories." Shvily photographs these housing developments when there are no people in sight, so that they take on a minimalist eeriness. She draws our attention to the banality f the new buildings, and in doing so, as I understand it, she means to merge opposition to the settlements with a kind f sly demonstration f her own good taste. Is her point that the settlements in the West Bank would be fine if Renzo Piano or Frank Gehry were drawing up the plans Two f the works that I liked best in the ICP triennial are brief films, perhaps because in these works the strangers are at last able to exert some freedom f movement, however limited that may be. Fiona Tan's "Facing Forward" is a collage f archival footage that focuses on indigenous peoples in New Guinea and other parts f Asia. We do not know what the original purpose f these brief lengths f film may have been, but we can see that much f it is at least half a century old, and the primitivism f the moviemaking technique lends anonymous men and women a haunted, there-but-not-there beauty. While Tan may believe that she is showing us the victims f colonial oppression, this archival footage has its own kind f subversive richness. These New Guinea natives, dressed in loincloths and little else, are certainly following the orders f some director or cameraman, but the film-makers' actual intentions remain murky, so that what we are left with is the modest yet vivid presence f particular people; embalmed in old celluloid, they become wistful victors. Perhaps the most impressive work in "Strangers" is Zwelethu Mthethwa's "Flex." Filmed in black and white, this series f close-ups f African men, mostly f their faces, has a boldness that recalls avant-garde silent films or the photographs f Renger-Patzsch. Mthethwa, who is South African, moves in close. He films heads right-side up and upside down, and he revels in the beautiful symmetry f eyes and nose and in the surprising form f an open mouth. He uses the energetic physicality f his images to build an erotic abstraction. If there is a single characteristic that all the best photographic work has in common, it is a certain plainness, a directness f address that does not in any way preclude the possibility f voluptuousness or complexity or ambiguity. Aaron Siskind 100 (powerHouse), an opulent album published to celebrate the centenary f the photographer's birth, contains only a brief page f text, a credo that Siskind wrote in 1950, but there is eloquence in these few sentences. "The business f making a photograph," Siskind observes, "may be said in simple terms to consist f three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet f paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together." This experience, Siskind continues, "may be described as one f total absorption in the object." Siskind's best-known photographs are abstractions in which close-ups f scruffy, urban surfaces are turned into boldfaced enigmas, and the lingering power f this spare imagery has everything to do with the extent to which the unnaturalness f Siskind's compositions draws on the naturalness f visual experience. In the 1930s, Siskind had been involved in documentary photography, recording the fluid street life f Harlem, and his move from social observation to mandarin abstraction, which follows an inward-turning path characteristic f mid-twentieth-century American art, sustains a concern with factuality, so that there is something in the man's cool, elegantly direct temperament that unites all his work, early and late. I believe that there is such a thing as a photographic temperament or personality, and that its salient trait is a respect for the given situation, whatever that may be. Siskind respects givenness, but then so does Lewis Hine. When the work f a photographer holds us, there is always an ease about observing the world, a steadiness that has nothing to do with complacency, and you can find this in work that is joyous or grim, maximalist or minimalist. The best photographers are phlegmatic personalities with a visionary spark. At "The Dawn f Photography" we are confronted with the very beginnings f this photographic directness, and it has a richness that suggests the mysterious, peremptory completeness f some mythic Golden Age. You might say that the entire history f photography is a meditation on the dawn f photography, for photographers, at least the ones who matter, are always looking for the plainness or the directness that stares out at us from those first daguerreotypes. The plainness f Stieglitz's Equivalents, those photographs f cloud-swept skies, is infused with an awareness f the metaphoric possibilities that Kandinsky wrote about in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And if there is a plainness to the best photographs f artistic and social personalities--to the strongest work f Beaton and Avedon and Penn and, more recently, Bruce Weber's photographs f Sam Shepard, which define a new kind f theatrical chic--it is the plainness f the all-knowing observer, f the observer who hasn't missed a moment f the big city's razzle-dazzle. You will not find this essential plainness in Diane Arbus's work, which instead offers us an impersonation f plainness that violates the very essence f photography. That such violations are commonplace is not especially surprising when we consider how difficult it is to achieve the not-so-simple simplicity that confronts us at every turn in the Metropolitan Museum f Art's unforgettable exploration f this demanding art. Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Dos Passos, John. The 42nd Parallel: First in the Trilogy U.S.A. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1930. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or: The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage International, 1985. Parfitt, Tom. "Bell tolls for Hemmingway's Fake Friend." The Observer. 12 February 2006. Accessed on 31 March 2006. Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos' U.S.A. Charlottesville: University Press f Virginia, 1988. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying f Lot 49. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University f Minnesota Press, 1991. Sontag, Susan. Susan Sontag on Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Dover: Dover Publications, 1997. Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley in Search f America. New York: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1961. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York: Garland reference Library, 1999. Walker, Jayne L. The Making f a Modernist: From Three Lives to Tender Buttons. Amherst: The University f Massachusetts Press, 1984. Woolf, Virginia. "Character in Fiction." The Essays f Virginia Woolf vol. 3: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Grafton Press, 1988. Read More