Diane Arbus' Search for Reality
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art DIANE ARBUS' SEARCH FOR REALITY BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Diane Arbus, nee Neme-rov, was born in 1923 and grew up on Central Park West with her brother Howard—the poet and critic—and her sister...
...I really mean it's terrific...
...I'm extremely likable with them...
...Perhaps it is the subject that evokes our sympathy: The disbelief with which the mother looks up at her ceiling-high son is most moving...
...We may turn away quickly, but the impulse is automatic...
...Brilliant as the pictures are, they are continually marred by condescension...
...The groups of idiots shambling around the countryside are especially distressing, some lovely light effects notwithstanding...
...Since compassion was not one of the photographer's virtues, it is interesting to note the one time it occurs—in a study of a Jewish giant with his parents...
...After 20 years, she retired from commercial art and began doing her own work, receiving instruction and encouragement from the photographer Lisette Model...
...still others may have cooperated because they instinctively recognized a kindred spirit...
...The scene showing a little boy—a northern redneck type—gripping a toy hand grenade, his face, hands and body contorted with frenzy, is a case in point...
...Her second career lasted only about 12 years, however, for in 1971 she committed suicide...
...There are more than a hundred pictures of misfortune here—actual and implied...
...In the tumult of emotions aroused, the single verifiable truth about the boy may well be missed: He is pathetic...
...I would submit there is a touch of the ambulance chaser in everyone that cranes instinctively to glimpse bare flesh, spilled blood, mental or physical deformity, or some equivalent public shock...
...The exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art (through January 21) includes samples of all of these, along with some interiors, a landscape and a study of the Warhol superstar, Viva...
...A question often asked about Arbus (her work has appeared at the Museum before, and last year she became the first American photographer to be shown at the Venice Biennial) is how she gained access to the lives of her subjects...
...Probably all of these assumptions are right, but what are we being asked to feel...
...In due course they forged a career in fashion photography, with Allan taking the pictures and Diane supplying the ideas...
...In contrast, Arbus turned her attention to the underprivileged...
...If her article in the October issue of Ms...
...It triggers a stream of equally hysterical responses: One envisages his "typically" Middle American background, a childhood of playing war games and watching John Wayne movies, and imagines him growing up to volunteer for Vietnam...
...It is of a handsome middle-aged woman, sitting smiling in the sun...
...Or was he invited to assume such a pose to illustrate her estimation of him...
...I don't mean I wish I looked like that...
...They can be seen as records of the photographer's struggle to feel something, anything, for which she required the spectacle of extremes in human experience—a human pin-cushion, for example...
...On this she said: "Actually they tend to like me...
...At the age of 18, she married Allan Arbus and the two of them joined the advertising department of her father's now defunct store...
...Was he in this stance when the photographer came along and "caught" him...
...As such, they lack universality...
...A clue to the Arbus oeuvre may he in the remark she made to her daughter on numerous occasions: "One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity...
...George Orwell was, in part, tackling the same problem when he went to live among society's outcasts...
...We are shown a Levittown living room at Christmas time and, by implication, invited to marvel at its spotless, soulless plas-ticness...
...Nonetheless, after a while it is irritating to be nudged into reactions as stereotyped as some of Arbus' images...
...magazine is anything to go by, it should be well worth reading...
...They're aristocrats...
...Some of the models are obviously exhibitionists...
...Consisting chiefly of immaculate black-and-white portraits, they are suitably presented in a white setting by the director of the Museum's Department of Photography, John Szarkowski...
...Her main interest lay in people of bizarre appearance or lifestyle, such as sexual deviates, circus and burlesque performers, dwarfs, nudists, identical twins and triplets...
...The same with age: As if it were not tragic enough to be old, misshapen and lonely, the berobed "King and Queen of a Senior Citizens' Dance" are punished twice by being displayed in all their foolishness...
...Having spent most of her working life presumably flattering the human form, she devoted the remainder to examining it...
...Many will recall that Richard Avedon turned against high fashion at about the same time Arbus did, publishing a book of portraits of the rich and famous, with text by Truman Capote...
...he found, incidentally, that he was never able to be more than a dilettante pariah, for he could always escape...
...On Art DIANE ARBUS' SEARCH FOR REALITY BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Diane Arbus, nee Neme-rov, was born in 1923 and grew up on Central Park West with her brother Howard—the poet and critic—and her sister Renee...
...I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality...
...When they do not seem like illustrations to the works of Carson McCullers, they become a police dossier compiled by Fellini...
...To me, Arbus' pictures appear to be catering to this reflex...
...He does look as if he might have some metabolic disorder...
...Whatever the motivation, I am as interested as the next person in seeing a transvestite wearing a garter belt...
...Interestingly enough, one picture in the exhibition lacks her characteristic "nimbus...
...It is prefaced by the photographer's own comments, transcribed from tapes by Doon Arbus, who is writing a book about her mother...
...Her daughter feels that by "evil" she meant what was forbidden, dangerous, frightening, or ugly: "She was determined to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on...
...Complementing the show is an album of Arbus pictures, published for MOMA by Aperture ($9.50 in paperback...
...She was quite forthright about her reason for concentrating on freaks: "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience...
...And when talking to her peers, Arbus seems to have feared sounding as expert as she was, or sounding anything but childlike and spontaneous, at least to judge from her fashionably small vocabulary and her fondness for the word "terrific...
...Her clothes and demeanor indicate that she is from a higher echelon than the other models—perhaps even Diane Arbus' own...
...It looks pretty tame now, but in those days it seemed to strip away much of the gauze that had protected us from the pores and wattles of some of the elite...
...Practically all of her pictures are unforgettable, and not entirely because of their content...
...Diane Arbus worked very proficiently with direct flash, available light or a combination of the two, both indoors and out...
...That this child is sick...
...Everything is Oooo...
...It is as though we were expected to be grateful our own lives were not warped by such an environment or, worse, to reioice that we had overcome such beginnings...
...And that sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one...
...It was while studying with Lisette Model that Arbus realized she wanted to depict "what is evil...
...In a sense, these pictures may be sadly autobiographical...
...She also focused on children and teenagers, the insane, and examples of loneliness and the aging process...
...They've already passed their test in life...
...The viewer is encouraged to conclude, not that all class patterns of taste and behavior are dismal, just other peoples...
...I think I'm kind of two-faced . . . I'm sort of a little too nice...
...Though that surely was her intention, the premise is dubious, given that people do not turn their backs on such matters, particularly if they are at a safe distance...
...others look too preoccupied to care that they were being photographed...
...Aside from questioning her definition of aristocracy—it might be better described as the state of not having to take any tests at all—one is impelled to point out a few holes in her testimony...
...As befitted the daughter of the owner of Russeks, a prosperous Fifth Avenue store, she was educated at the School of Ethical Culture and Field-ston...
...She evidently decided, as first-year art students used to, that reality lay at the point farthest from her own origins, along with "character...
...I hear myself saying, 'How terrific,' and there's this woman making a face...
...Had she lived, she might have discovered that freaks too have an immunity, that her own kind's reality (or unreality) was no less valid than theirs...
...Freaks were born with their trauma...
...Her light, which seems cold even in the sun, exposes one specimen after another for our fascination...
...One contemplates her rendition of, say, loneliness, with a sense of voyeurism rather than empathy...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 25
