Diane Arbus: Photography of the Everyday or Pictures for the Freak Show - Case Study Example

Running Head: Diane Arbus, Photography Of The Everyd Diane Arbus, photography of the everyday or pictures for the freak show? While it is the natural shimmering beauty οf the daguerreotype that carries us through "The Dawn οf Photography" and makes magic οf such curiosities as a photomicrograph οf a drop οf 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 οf 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 οf Photography" is that the very frankness οf photography can also inspire a whole other kind οf artistic posturing. For if directness is photography's glory, it is also liable to be manipulated, used as a sort οf all-purpose rhetorical device, until frankness itself becomes a form οf obfuscation or artiness--which is a fair description, I think, οf the work οf Diane Arbus. Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age οf 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 οf the posthumous retrospective at the Museum οf Modern Art in 1972. Arbus's warts-and-all photographs, which are at once exposes and benedictions, create just the right kind οf 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 οf 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 οf the highfalutin creep-out. In a series οf photographs οf older women on the streets οf 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 οf their self-delusion. What's missing is the delicacy that Brassai (whose work Arbus admired) brought to his famous photograph οf an old whore, swathed in cheap jewellery, seated in a café. Brassaï reminds us that, for all her haggard theatricality, this wreck οf a woman is still the proud possessor οf a pair οf beautiful, velvety eyes. Arbus uses the fixity οf 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 οf revelation. Arbus is one οf those devious bohemians who celebrate other people's eccentricities and are all the while aggrandizing their own narcissistically pessimistic view οf the world. In a letter from 1968, Arbus observes that "all families are creepy in a way," and οf 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 οf 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 οf 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 οf some οf her last photographs, and you feel the warmth οf her attention to these people--indeed, the problem may be that she makes too much οf 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 οf a technical discussion οf her method οf mixing strobe and daylight to create certain bright yet grayed-down effects. "I am like someone who gets excellent glasses because οf 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 οf photography. And even as she rages against the coolness οf the medium, she is wrapping herself in photography's inherent earnestness. The photographs are an emotional tease. Nowadays the very concept οf 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 οf 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 οf attention this fall is Katy Grannan, who finds the men and women who are the subjects οf 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 οf course we take a look. While Grannan exercises a certain amount οf control over these experiments in the banality οf voyeurism, I am unable to locate a scrap οf 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 οf Photography's "Strangers," which has its share οf photographers, like Rineke Dijkstra and Collier Schorr, who play a sort οf bait-and-switch game with their frequently young and attractive subjects, presenting them as visual candy and as something else--as illustrations οf 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 οf the forty photographers and video artists whose work is on display. Justine Kurland's pictures οf men and women who live on contemporary communes are not much more than impressively stage-managed magazine illustrations, and yet her cast οf characters are a fascinating bunch. I had mixed responses to Shizuka Yokomizo's photographs οf people seen though the windows οf their apartments. Yokomizo sends letters to the occupants οf 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 οf 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 οf political dissent in Efrat Shvily's series οf 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 οf the new buildings, and in doing so, as I understand it, she means to merge opposition to the settlements with a kind οf sly demonstration οf 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 οf 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 οf movement, however limited that may be. Fiona Tan's "Facing Forward" is a collage οf archival footage that focuses on indigenous peoples in New Guinea and other parts οf Asia. We do not know what the original purpose οf these brief lengths οf film may have been, but we can see that much οf it is at least half a century old, and the primitivism οf 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 οf colonial oppression, this archival footage has its own kind οf subversive richness. These New Guinea natives, dressed in loincloths and little else, are certainly following the orders οf 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 οf 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 οf close-ups οf African men, mostly οf their faces, has a boldness that recalls avant-garde silent films or the photographs οf 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 οf eyes and nose and in the surprising form οf an open mouth. He uses the energetic physicality οf 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 οf address that does not in any way preclude the possibility οf voluptuousness or complexity or ambiguity. Aaron Siskind 100 (powerHouse), an opulent album published to celebrate the centenary οf the photographer's birth, contains only a brief page οf text, a credo that Siskind wrote in 1950, but there is eloquence in these few sentences. "The business οf making a photograph," Siskind observes, "may be said in simple terms to consist οf three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet οf paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together." This experience, Siskind continues, "may be described as one οf total absorption in the object." Siskind's best-known photographs are abstractions in which close-ups οf scruffy, urban surfaces are turned into boldfaced enigmas, and the lingering power οf this spare imagery has everything to do with the extent to which the unnaturalness οf Siskind's compositions draws on the naturalness οf visual experience. In the 1930s, Siskind had been involved in documentary photography, recording the fluid street life οf Harlem, and his move from social observation to mandarin abstraction, which follows an inward-turning path characteristic οf 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 οf 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 οf Photography" we are confronted with the very beginnings οf this photographic directness, and it has a richness that suggests the mysterious, peremptory completeness οf some mythic Golden Age. You might say that the entire history οf photography is a meditation on the dawn οf 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 οf Stieglitz's Equivalents, those photographs οf cloud-swept skies, is infused with an awareness οf the metaphoric possibilities that Kandinsky wrote about in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And if there is a plainness to the best photographs οf artistic and social personalities--to the strongest work οf Beaton and Avedon and Penn and, more recently, Bruce Weber's photographs οf Sam Shepard, which define a new kind οf theatrical chic--it is the plainness οf the all-knowing observer, οf the observer who hasn't missed a moment οf the big city's razzle-dazzle. You will not find this essential plainness in Diane Arbus's work, which instead offers us an impersonation οf plainness that violates the very essence οf 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 οf Art's unforgettable exploration οf 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 οf Virginia, 1988. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying οf Lot 49. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University οf 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 οf America. New York: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1961. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York: Garland reference Library, 1999. Walker, Jayne L. The Making οf a Modernist: From Three Lives to Tender Buttons. Amherst: The University οf Massachusetts Press, 1984. Woolf, Virginia. "Character in Fiction." The Essays οf Virginia Woolf vol. 3: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Grafton Press, 1988. Read More