Daily Blague

Diane Arbus was the first art photographer that I ever heard of. At a certain point in the early Seventies, her pictures were everywhere. There were three or four almost unavoidable ones: "A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY (1970)," "A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, NY. (1968)," "They have never met before. (1970)," and, most indelibly, "Identical Twins, Roselle NJ" (1967). (For the first three pictures, click here; for the twins, here.) Arbus was associated with the freakish and the unattractive; it was not difficult in those days to regard her work as critical of the United States. I never found the pictures appealing, and I didn't buy the catalogue because I knew that I would never open it. But I'm very glad that I saw the show, and I recommend it to everyone.

I hadn't seen every image before, but I'd seen most of them, or thought that I had. The work seemed to fall into two groups, the "Untitled" series from Arbus's last year (she committed suicide in the summer of 1971) and everything else. The "Untitled" series consists of photographs of masked and costumed individuals, most of them elderly. There is the strong feeling of Halloween at an institution, and many of images are simply Saul Steinberg's grotesques rendered in photography. And yet these pictures are very unlike Steinberg's in one important respect: the photographer seems to have said goodbye to the fundamentals of human society. The "Untitled" pictures are, literally, dreadful.

I came away doubting that Arbus meant her work to be taken as critical of American society. (Except, perhaps, for the picture of those Westchester sunbathers, which fairly screams "Behold the emptiness and banality of the American suburbs!) If she meant to criticize anything, it must have been the milieu in which she started out, as a fashion photographer. Fashion generally and fashion photography in particular depend entirely upon desire; even the repellent is presented as irresistible. Fashion ignores the boring, the ugly, the misshapen, the luckless; it resolutely turns it back on the charmlessly unfortunate. "Charmlessly unfortunate" handily describes most of Arbus's subjects, even the few who, like Mrs Charlton Henry of Chestnut Hill, are not leading uncomfortable lives. Arbus insists that we recognize that these people exist: that nature is horribly inequitable, and that even the fat and the wrinkled know hope and love. Her pictures are not the trumpeted insults for which Richard Avedon became perversely famous, but they are hardly flattering, none less so than the shots of transvestites (daring subjects in those days - many of the pictures would have been upstaged by their titles). But it is this very quality that brings the implicit possibility of love to the fore. These people may look monstrous and deluded, but their emotions are the familiar ones.

And everything but the faces is familiar, too. We have all taken dozens of snapshots just like them, neither candid nor posed. Arbus took her pictures on location: in Central Park, in the street, in the hotel rooms and dressing rooms of entertainers. It is unlikely that she took many photographs of any one arrangement, or urged a subject to "put your hand there, like that." The power of Diane Arbus's photography comes from its unaffected disdain for artifice. Arbus is less the technically accomplished photographer than the visionary who exploits her medium to tell us something important about the world. The final "Untitled" series suggests that this something became impossible to live with. But even more awful than her death is the fashionable appropriation of her work.

From the museum, we walked back to the apartment for a pot of tea. Stimulated by what we'd seen, I talked the entire way, deciding, somewhere near Scientology's town house and PS 6, to share my theory of respectability with Ms Nola, and I was well into this as we crossed Park Avenue. At the median island, Ms Nola elbowed me and apologized: "That was Woody Allen!" I, of course, had been staring at the pavement - I recommend ankylosing spondylitis to all peripatetic philosophers - but I did turn, to see the retreating figure of a small man. I don't doubt that Ms Nola was right. Later, I couldn't help thinking what a Woody-Allen picture we had made: in the Manhattan snowfall, an older man pontificates while a pretty younger woman listens. Within the time it would take for a Polaroid to deepen into print, I felt like a complete cliché, the oddness of my life, such as it is, translated into a movie that Woody Allen made twenty years ago.