Diane Arbus

photographer

Diane Arbus was an American photographer, born in New York in 1923, whose singular, often shocking portraits became some of the most iconic and modern images of the 1960s.

”A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know” (Arbus 1971, 64). Although Arbus’s quote reveals her scepticism about the common assumption that photography tells the truth – in other words, that it is a visually accurate medium – her work was nevertheless linked to the documentary photographic tradition.
In the late 1950s, American photographers in particular began to register their dissatisfaction with the prevailing photographic conventions, which focused on formalism or ‘fine art’ aesthetics. Photojournalism – including its role in larger cultural upheavals such as Vietnam, the civil rights and women’s movements – emerged as a viable mode of photography. The role of the photographer in relation to his or her subject also came under scrutiny. Post-World War II figures such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson and Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Davidson and Arbus, among others, turned their cameras on the common, everyday and often ugly realities of urban life and the individual subject. Their vernacular approach, which actually borrowed from both the fine art and documentary traditions, came to be known as the snapshot aesthetic. These images of the so-called ‘social landscape’ were often taken quickly with portable 35mm cameras, often on the street. They appeared to be casually composed (if at all), incorporating movement and chance.
Critics and historians of photography such as Nathan Lyons and John Szarkowski sought to describe this new development, which brought a greater, more self-conscious creativity to the objective and socially conscious image.
A formative exhibition that introduced the notion of social landscape photography was New Documents: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand (1967), organised by Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As head of the museum’s photography department from 1962 to 1991, Szarkowski’s wide-ranging and groundbreaking exhibitions helped to place photography alongside painting and sculpture in the art museum and beyond. New Documents ushered in a new era of photography that emphasised the pathos and conflicts of modern life, presented without editorialising or sentimentalising, but with a critical, observant eye. Szarkowski saw in these three artists a shift in the documentary approach, traced back to Walker Evans, that incorporated deeply personal aims. He wrote in the museum’s wall plaque: ”Their aim was not to reform life, but to know it. Her work betrays a sympathy – almost an affection – for the imperfections and frailties of society (Szarkowski quoted in Diane Arbus Revelations 2003, 51).
Arbus’s affinity for imperfection and frailty is now legendary, making her role in this shift historically relevant. Yet her oeuvre is also distinctive and virtually unique in her generation for its emphasis on portraiture in the classical sense.
Unlike the loose and cropped compositions of her peers, who often captured fleeting images and moments, Arbus’s photographs relied on some kind of established relationship between the subject and the photographer. In other words, Arbus’s process intimately involved the subject, who was usually posed and always aware of the photographer’s presence. While the images may appear candid, they were often carefully composed with an emphasis on visual narrative and description. Her talent lay in her uncanny ability to convey something distinct, private and mutable about her subjects’ personalities, fantasies or experiences, what she called ”the gap between intention and effect” (Arbus 1972, 1-2). Drawn to the power of myth and self-invention, Arbus’s titles reflected this interest in telling a story about her subjects: A Family on their Lawn on a Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. (1968), Man at a Parade on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. (1969), A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. (1970), and Child with a Toy Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962). This narrative approach is linked to the context in which the images were first seen – primarily in the pages of popular magazines, where they appeared as photo essays.
Diane Nemerov Arbus’s photographic career began as a commercial one, in partnership with her husband, Allan Arbus. The couple ran a successful commercial studio in New York City, and their work appeared regularly in Glamour and other magazines. Diane usually came up with the concepts and designed and styled the shots, while Allan worked behind the camera; she learned from him how to develop film and print negatives in the makeshift darkroom that was the couple’s bathroom.
At the same time, she took her own pictures, using a 35mm Nikon to photograph people, often characters she met on the street. The Arbuses worked together from about 1941 until 1956, when Diane left the business to pursue her own photography full-time; she took editorial assignments to pay for more creative, personal work.
In 1959, she received her first commissioned photo essay, ostensibly about the vagaries of urban life in New York City, for Esquire magazine. Entitled The Vertical Journey: Six Movements of a Moment Within the Heart of the City, the portfolio included portraits as diverse as a sideshow performer known as The Jungle Creep, who appeared at Hubert’s Museum of Eccentrics in Times Square, to an honorary regent of the Washington Heights chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
She went on to have more than 250 images published in Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, the Sunday Times Magazine of London and elsewhere. Other photo essays included The Auguries of Innocence (Harper’s Bazaar, December 1963), The Soothsayers – What’s New: The Witch Predicts (Glamour, January and October 1964) and People Who Think They Look Like Other People (Nova, October 1969). Arbus usually wrote extensive text captions for the images in the essays. She approached her personal work in much the same way.
Although Arbus’s most famous subjects were outsiders such as transvestites, strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves and other ”freaks”, she was equally drawn to the prosaic in subjects as ordinary as children, mothers, couples, old people and the like. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: at home, on the street, at work, in the park. While the setting often provides a description of the sitter’s personality or life, it does not detract from the point, which is the poignancy or intensity of the interaction between Arbus and her subject.
She admired and was influenced by the typologies of August Sander, whose assorted shopkeepers, industrial workers, farmers, artists and social outcasts reflected the archetypes the photographer found in his own milieu – Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. She shared with Sander a broad iconography and a sympathy for subjects presented without romanticism. Her almost archaeological interest in social mores and milieus is evident in her project proposal for a 1963 Guggenheim grant. Entitled American Rites, Manners and Customs, it sought to depict a range of social ceremonies, including beauty pageants, games and competitions, costumes, parties and the like. Arbus called these ceremonies ”our symptoms and our moments. I want to save them, because what is ceremonial and curious and ordinary will become legendary” (Arbus quoted in Diane Arbus Revelations 41). She won this grant and received a second from the Guggenheim in 1966. Arbus’s photography is also influenced by her teacher, Austrian-born Lisette Model, who also photographed for Harper’s Bazaar and whose expressive images monumentalise her human, often quirky subjects.
To achieve sharper, less grainy images, by 1963 Arbus had abandoned the 35mm format in favour of a wide-angle Rolleiflex and later a Mamiyaflex camera, each of which produced square negatives.
The photographer held the cameras at waist level, facing down, which slowed the process of taking the picture considerably. This format suited her long portrait sessions. In addition, the wide angle of her first Rolleiflex slightly distorted the contents of the frame, giving the composition a subtle twist that enhanced the psychological effect of the image. As early as 1965, she began to print her images with irregular black borders that showed the entire uncropped negative. These borders drew attention to the fact that the image was constructed on a two-dimensional surface rather than a window-like view of the subject. Typical of the documentary aesthetic of the 1960s, Arbus’s use of negative borders emphasised the subjectivity of the photographer and her vision. Arbus’s portraits explore the surface of people, their facades, costumes, eccentricities, and her direct, frontal compositions reflect this. But the piercing gaze often points to a hidden psychology, or at least to the traces of vulnerability that lie beneath that surface.
Historians have noted the power and discomfort associated with Arbus’s seemingly voyeuristic iconography, especially in relation to the viewer.
Arbus was acutely aware of the role she played in relation to her subjects, including any responsibility she might have for or to them. Recognising that the images were the result of an often passionate, emotional investment in her subjects, she was careful to temper this with aesthetic deliberation and dispassion.
This complex intertwining of roles – between photographer and subject, photographer and viewer, and subject and viewer – reveals Arbus’s masterful understanding of empathy moderated by critical distance (Phillips, Diane Arbus Revelations 59). Indeed, the gravitas of her work lay in this acute triangular relationship between photographer, subject and viewer. It represented a rather early understanding of the theory of the image that would later inform much of postmodern photography.
In keeping with Arbus’s interest in subcultures, in 1969 she began photographing at a home for the mentally retarded in New Jersey. These images remain enigmatic glimpses into the photographer’s subjective mind, as well as beautifully poignant representations that seem to teeter on the line between normal and abnormal.
Arbus’s concern to show her subjects as individuals – without exploitation or editorialisation – was reflected in the seriousness of this personal project, for which she had to obtain extensive permissions. Most of the photographs in this series were printed and titled posthumously (as Untitled images). In her notebooks at the time, she listed the names of the various residents, often describing particular interactions on a given day. The work was edited by her daughter Doon Arbus and published in 1995 (Arbus, Untitled 1995).
In the same year, she produced a limited-edition portfolio of museum-quality prints entitled A Box of Ten Photographs (dated 1970). The prints were displayed in a minimalist, elegant, clear box that doubled as a framing device, designed by her friend Marvin Israel. The collection of photographs – all of which were family related – and their presentation made a conscious statement about how she saw herself as an artist and her photography (Phillips, Diane Arbus Revelations 66). The portfolio included several images from New Documents and five that had been published in Artforum, May 1971. She advertised the sale of the portfolio in Artforum magazine; only four sets were sold during her lifetime, one to the artist Jasper Johns.
At the time of her death by suicide in 1971 (she had suffered from depression throughout her adult life), Arbus’s photography was not widely exhibited in museums and galleries, although it would prove instrumental in the artistic reappraisal of photography in American museums, where the medium would find a secure and stable place during Szarkowski’s tenure. Although Arbus had serious reservations about showing her images in museum exhibitions, where she feared her intentions might be misunderstood, her work has retained a vital and important place in the history of photography.