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Rangefinder Magazine
December 2003

Diane Arbus by Judith Bell
Revelations

“I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”—Diane Arbus

Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C., 1966

Whether photographing a giant awkwardly arranging himself in his parents’ diminutive home or a pair of older women lunching at the automat, Arbus recorded both the unusual and the everyday with humanity and feeling. Focusing primarily on women and children, subjects predisposed to revealing their emotions, she created images that strike the viewer with the stunning immediacy of a personal encounter. Her unique gift for discovering the strange in the familiar and the familiar within the strange moves us today with the same power as when the images were first taken.

“ Diane Arbus: Revelations,” an exhibition now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (SFMOMA) takes the viewer inside the artist’s creative process. Arbus is revealed to us not only in more than 200 images, the iconic as well as the unfamiliar, but also through the display of contact sheets, letters, notebooks and other writings, and books from her personal library. These materials enrich our understanding of the breadth and endurance of her powerful visual legacy.

A Young Brooklyn family going on a Sunday outing, N.Y.C., 1966

Born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923, Arbus belonged to an upper-middle class Jewish family that owned a Fifth Avenue clothing store. She attended Fieldston, the Riverdale campus of the Ethical Culture School, and early on acquired a passion for reading and an interest in mythology.

In 1941 she married Allan Arbus, with whom she shared her growing interest in photography. He gave her a Graflex camera and she took a class with Berenice Abbott covering the technical aspects of photography. Allan proved adept at the medium and together they created a series of fashion photographs that convinced Arbus’ father to hire them as photographers for Russek’s ad campaign.

Diane collaborated with Allan as a stylist in their fashion photography business while continuing to take her own photographs and studying with Alexey Brodovitch, legendary art editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and Lisette Model. From them she briefly adopted the practice of cropping the images taken with her 35mm Nikon to establish a greater sense of immediacy in a print. By 1958, she abandoned the process, preferring to work full frame and build urgency through her relationship with her subject.

	Untitled (6) (three in a field), 1970-71

In 1959 she began keeping a working notebook, a practice that would continue for the balance of her career. Here she recorded thoughts, words, stories told by people she photographed, titles of books she intended to read for research purposes, and observations from her reading or spoken by friends. Within the pages are what exhibition co-curator Sandra Phillips calls “mediations, often elliptical, on the complicated and special contract between herself and the subject she chose:”

“ Nothing human is alien to me”—Terence “To confess to someone is to implicate, involve them.”—N [Nancy Bellamy] “If we are all freaks the task is to become as much as possible the freak we are.”—M [Marvin Israel] “Vampires are a metaphor for the dependency of power.” “A murderer needs a victim…” “Freaks are a fairy tale for grownups.” “A metaphor which bleeds.”

Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967

That same year, Arbus met with Esquire’s art director, Robert Benton, regarding an issue focusing on New York. Benton was taken with the images like “42nd Street Movie Theater Audience, N.Y.C., 1958” that Arbus had made inside darkened theaters. Her photographic essay, appearing in the July 1960 issue, included images of people usually seen in popular magazine spreads of the time—a society woman, a D.A.R. member. But alongside them were midget actor Andrew Ratoucheff, who impersonated Marilyn Monroe and Maurice Chevalier, and the man who played the “Jungle Creep” in Hubert’s Museum on Times Square. In her project notes she compared her journey to Alice in Wonderland: “I fell into it like Alice… The journey was vertical and dizzying like Alice’s.” During the next decade, working for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines, she published more than 100 pictures, including portraits and photographic essays. Some originated as personal work that were occasionally accompanied by her writing.

Arbus’ fascination with the issue of identity led her to photograph female impersonators backstage. For Arbus, these self-determined figures were flesh-and-blood embodiments of her continuing fascination with fairy tale and myth.

A child crying, N.J., 1967

She wrote: “Like the greatest living parody they shriek and bicker and wriggle and smile so splendidly that any real woman looks pale and dubious beside them. Sometimes they undergo a series of operations to make their noses smaller or their hips larger, their calves more delicate or their bosoms more convincing. The gradual metamorphosis of one sex to another is so… [illeg.] that no one of either can fail to be stirred and dizzied and beguiled before them. For while it may not be as helpful as Prometheus, it is purely audacious to steal from Venus everything she holds most dear.”

In 1962, Arbus left behind the 35mm camera favored by documentary photographers of the time for a square-format camera that gave her portraits the formal classical style for which she became known. When Arbus approached John Szarkowski, Photography Department head at the Museum of Modern Art for a reference for her pursuit of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship grant, the images she showed him reminded him of the work of August Sander. He brought out boxes of the German photographer’s images to show Arbus. While she was familiar with Sander and his goal of documenting the whole of German society, the dignity and respect with which he approached his subjects acquired new meaning in light of what co-curator Phillips calls Arbus’ “own desire to explore the singularity of each person she photographed.”

In her 1963 Guggenheim grant application, she proposed photographing “American Rites, Manners, and Customs.” Arbus wrote:

	42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C., 1958

“ I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend, while living here and now, to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning.… These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonial and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”

A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968

Awarded Guggenheims in 1963 and 1966 for this project, she expanded her images of New York and New Jersey, visited Pennsylvania, Florida, and California. She photographed contests and festivals, public and private rituals.
What emerges for the viewer is a very different approach to the prevalent mode of making art that dominated the period in which Arbus was active. Heroic aggressive art surged to the forefront in the late 1950s and ’60s, led by artists like Richard Serra, with his large-scale sculptures and Robert Smithson, whose Spiral Jetty took the earth itself as its canvas. Like her contemporary French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Arbus was instead guided by intuitive and emotional responses.

Her intense interest in how her subjects saw themselves further differentiated Arbus’ work from that of her contemporaries. She wrote, “Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way, and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.… Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect.” Phillips calls this “gap” the defining aspect of Arbus’ work.

	Child selling plastic orchids at night, N.Y.C., 1963

One of the biggest surprises for Phillips while working on the Arbus material for the exhibit was realizing just how intelligent and deliberate the photographer was in making her art. “This was a woman who thought about photography, who thought about her intentions as she worked,” says Phillips. “Unfortunately, she’s become known as a photographer of freaks. Her influence has been exclusively to encourage people to look at ‘the other’ as problematic people and to experience superiority over these subjects, when Arbus herself had only respect for her subjects and was instead a great humanist.”

Judith Bell is an art historian and critic based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in American Photo, Art & Antiques, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Omni, and Photo District News, among others.