by ANDY GRUNDBERG
Arbus in her New York City apartment in 1971. On the wall behind her are photographs of victims of violence and people with physical deformities. PHOTO/Eva Rubinstein
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow; Ecco, 752 pp., $35
Casting an eye on “freaks” with sensitivity and compassion
Diane Arbus is one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers, who along with two other greats, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, first gained fame in the 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, unlike Friedlander and Winogrand, whose snapshot-indebted, 35-millimeter images fell into the new category of “street photography,” Arbus was a classic portraitist, positioning her subjects by ones and twos at the center of her camera’s square frame and having them look straight into the lens in a manner reminiscent of German photographer August Sander, whom Arbus credited as her greatest influence.
But what subjects they were! Nudists, dwarfs, sword swallowers, transvestites, autistic adults, and possibly normative children who acted bizarrely under Arbus’s scrutiny—together they constitute a menagerie of human oddity. The shorthand she used for them was “freaks,” but the term does justice neither to their diversity nor to the emotional intensity she brought to the task. In the 45 years since her suicide at age 48, her pictures have retained both their shock value and their gnomic instability, teetering between the poles of documentation and invention, reality and dream.
As with Robert Mapplethorpe, another photographer who knew a thing or two about shock value, the enduring scandal of Arbus’s work has fomented an enduring interest in her life, as if some inscrutable message embedded in the photographs could be decoded by knowing more about the eye behind the camera. (Suffice it to say, if I believed this were true, my long shelf of photographers’ biographies would not be covered with a film of dust.) In Arbus’s case, the raw material a biographer has to work with is at once rich and deep, filled with vignettes of the fashion and magazine industries, the textures of bohemian life in Manhattan in the ’50s and ’60s, sexual and romantic escapades, feminism in the form of women’s liberation, a budding photo art scene, and, of course, suicide.
The manner of Arbus’s death, like that of poet Sylvia Plath and, in a newer generation, photographer Francesca Woodman, has become part of her artistic legacy, as if her untimely end resulted inevitably from her work. Not to mention the male-dominated world in which she lived, which, as some feminists have asserted, helped undercut her sense of self-worth. But there was plenty going on with Arbus psychologically—depression, sexual promiscuity, incest, and a declining ability to form and keep meaningful relationships—that had nothing to do with her art or ambition. She was quite simply a mess of a human being.
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