Whatever Happened to the Family of Man?
Lemann, Nicholas
Whatever Happened to the Family of Man? by Nicholas Lemann Why the death of documentary photography was bad for democracy Not long ago I saw the famous old chiller, The Thing, for the first...
...In the sixties, Bosworth says, Dorothea Lange tried to organize photographers to petition the government to start a huge new documentary project modeled on the FSA file, but Arbus was completely uninterested...
...That kind of casual xenophobia and antiintellectualism-the sense that only normal guys are to be admired or trusted-has disappeared from our culture, and when we look back nostalgically to the fifties, we forget that it ever existed...
...Meanwhile, is it just the imagination of a photography buff, or is the country beginning to show the ill effects of the death of documentary photography too...
...Diane Arbus A Biography...
...She was a tortured soul and ultimately a suicide...
...I can't think of an image that stays in my mind as a symbol of poverty in the Reagan administration and, as a result, that is still an abstract issue, susceptible to being obscured by statistical ping-pong games (by the Republicans) or rhetorical linkage of the poor to social security recipients (by the Democrats...
...Today documentary photography on the scale of those projects is unknown, and, within the photography world, documentary work of a populist cast, which during the thirties, forties, and fifties was immensely respected, is a forgotten art...
...in the case of Arbus, and much more obviously with the photographers who followed her, she was...
...In other words, as a figure she could be considered alongside great modern artists of the age in other fields, such as Robert Lowell or John Berryman, Jackson Pollack or Arshile Gorky, Jean Stafford or Norman Mailer...
...If that show was the end of the old era, the beginning of the new was the publication in 1959 of Robert Frank's The Americans...
...Because photography is now so firmly the province of the studios and the museums, the salvation of its documentary tradition will have to come from them as a matter of shifting aesthetic standards...
...Magazines and newspapers began to hire photography critics...
...During those 20 years, documentary photography made a real difference in American life...
...Each group and class and occupation looks out for its own interests...
...Knopf, $17.95...
...A show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, called "New Documents" and featuring work by her, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, made her famous, but as she got deeper into her weird subject matter she became incurably depressed...
...A group of new photography galleries, led by the Witkin and the Robert Miller on the high-priced 57th Street gallery row, opened up...
...At 18 she married a clerk in her family's business, the fashionable women's store, Russek's Fifth Avenue...
...Adams, for instance, supported himself as an artist from the forties on...
...In the case of Evans, his subjects were...
...All three were spiritual descendants of Robert Frank, documenting American everyday life outside the context of the official iconography, but with a little more spin on the ball...
...This world, consisting of museums, galleries, collectors, and university departments of photography, had existed to a small extent for years...
...1938...
...That might seem like a false dichotomy—wasn't Walker Evans a modern artist too?—but it is valid, and important, if "modern artist" is understood as someone whose work is driven by a desire to explore perception and the self rather than to depict the truth of other lives and places...
...Well before the sixties, of course, many of the leading American photographers pointedly regarded themselves as artists...
...The resulting spirit of community helped lay the groundwork for New Deal, the rights movement, and the establishment of the Peace Corps...
...While there is no longer the feeling that scientists, or blacks, or immigrants are not somehow real Americans, neither is there a feeling of mass empathy flowing among all these people...
...The FSA photographs, by making vivid conditions in the Dust Bowl, helped lay the groundwork for the relief legislation of the New Deal, and therefore for the flowering of the American welfare state...
...The images of those who are obviously so show an empathy so deep that it raises them to the level of art...
...another is military service...
...If such work made the photography-as-art establishment necessary and important once it got cranked up, it in turn provided artistically ambitious photographers with an incentive to concentrate on using their work to convey what was behind the lens, rather than what was in front of it...
...The picture magazines energetically promoted the image of World War II as a noble cause involving Americans from ail walks of life, and thus boosted morale and resolve on the front and at home...
...Diane Arbus, having grown up in the fashion business, naturally fell into the studio photography branch, and her editorial work in the late forties and early fifties was for magazines like Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue...
...The public impact of Susan Meiselas's great pictures of El Salvador, while an exception to the rule—you've seen the one of a death squad's white handprint on a red door—proves the overall point...
...Intuitively, it would seem that of all the artistic media, photography would have the hardest time adapting to this mode...
...The schools and galleries and museums and critics all depended on the idea that a photographer is an artist, which is why Diane Arbus was crucial in helping provide the justification for a vast bureaucratic expansion of the photography-as-art institutions...
...Often in her pictures the freaks will be in comfortable repose, looking at the camera straight on, seemingly at peace...
...It is possible to attract great excitement and renown in photography today by taking pictures of, for instance, yourself in various insouciant poses (like Cindy Sherman), or your dog dressed in funny costumes (like William Wegman...
...When shooting freaks, Arbus seems to have been gentle and kind, often forming lasting friendships with them—Bosworth has done an impressive job of tracking these people down, and they usually remember Arbus fondly...
...The world she portrayed was different from what one saw walking down the street...
...Arbus was born in New York in 1924 and grew up in luxury on Central Park West and Park Avenue...
...New museums opened, like the International Center for Photography in New York...
...She was a rebel against conventional society...
...Her photography was really less a chronicle of an American subculture than an evocation of something within herself...
...Patricia Bosworth's biography of Arbus* makes it clear that this was no accident...
...Alfred Steiglitz pratically invented the role—in the teens and twenties he lived a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village, consorted with painters, established an art gallery for photography, and even dressed in a beret and smock...
...The great practitioners of the past, like Evans, Lange, or Robert Capa, are still gods, but the young photographers who are considered important work in an entirely different vein...
...Her photographs are striking first because so many of them are of people of great physical or emotional strangeness: transvestites in drag, giants, midgets, retards, sideshow acts, nudists, and on and on...
...Studio photography continued to thrive, as it does today, and it is possible for someone like Avedon to build a serious, artistic reputation from a comfortable economic base in fashion photography...
...What such artists had in common was that their work looked inward—explored the artist's own soul more deeply than it chronicled social reality...
...Friedlander used Frank's modus operandi, traveling around the country alone, but instead of shooting a street scene or a restaurant he would shoot the television set in his motel room, or his own feet, or his reflection in a store window, so that what emerged from his work was not a portrait of America but an oddly evasive portrait of Lee Friedlander...
...Whereas the "Family of Man" show was an immense popular success, The Americans attracted no popular audience, and what critical attention it got was almost all hostile...
...But he, and later primarily "artistic" photographers like Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, and Minor White, worked in the exacting tradition of still-life and landscape painters, worshipping at the altar of tone and form and composition...
...But the fate of great documentary photography was now in the hands of the leaders of the world of photography-as-art, of whom the most important by far was Szarkowsky...
...There were two overlapping branches of magazine photography: technically polished studio photography, whose commercial lifeblood was provided by the fashion business, and photojournalism, which revolved around the big picture magazine, then the main visual medium of national news...
...In the late fifties the Arbuses separated, and Diane, working alone, began voluminously photographing oddballs and freaks around New York and New Jersey...
...That they had personal obsessions was obvious, but their work was meant to be accessible at the level of its beauty...
...Newspaper photography has always been regarded as a poor relation of magazine photography, and only one person, the New York Daily News's blood-and-gore specialist, who called himself Weegee, has been admitted to the consensual pantheon of great photographers on the basis of newspaper work...
...But inexorably it began to happen...
...There had been a brief vogue in the late forties and early fifties of photodocumentary projects sponsored by big corporations, but that had passed as well...
...If curators, gallery owners, teachers, collectors, critics, and magazine art directors change their signals, photographers will respond by dropping the pose of the creative genius and will begin again to direct their greatest energies toward conveying the richness and meaning that are in the visible world...
...What caused the change in photography...
...Doesn't the interregional squabbling that has become a constant part of American life ease up a little every time there is a dramatic visual event, like the Olympics, that shows people all over the country to be the same...
...She dwelt on the darker side of life...
...So in the trappings of a documentarian, Arbus was instead a modern artist...
...Winogrand was the most like Frank, but his work was one step more artificial, with obtrusive flash lighting or obviously odd composition...
...It happened because, as we were opening up-the country, we let the institutions that might have kept the overall sense of community strong decline, and as a result we fumble and bicker when galled on to act in terms of national purpose...
...Prices for prints soared...
...Her husband, Allan Arbus, became a military photographer during World War II, and when he returned to New York he and Diane set up a mom-and-pop fashion photography studio that became moderately successful...
...The government never cranked up another FSA-like photographic project...
...Frank was a Swiss emigre who had won a Guggenheim fellowship and had taken off on a beatnik's tour of the country (Jack Kerouac wrote the foreword to the book), free to photograph whatever cars and bars and lonely towns caught his eye, with no editor to answer to...
...A space drip crashes next to a remote military research station near the North Pole, leaving, as its remains a huge figure encased in a block of ice...
...There were still magazine photojournalistic assignments, but they paid far less than Life and Look had, and because the surviving magazines tended to cater to chic, affluent audiences, the editorial pressures on photographers were less to be populist and more to be aesthetically au courant...
...So by the seventies the way the great photojournalists—Evans, Lange, Lee, Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, the whole immortal roster—had done their work and made their living no longer existed...
...The scientists at the research station try, in the name of advancement of knowledge, to revive the Thing, and after they succeed', the military officers, kill it, thereby saving the world., At the climactic moment the manly hero, an air force officer, listens to a speech about science and universal brotherhood from the sniveling chief scientist, then knocks the creature unconscious with a light back-of-the-hand and gets on with it...
...In fact they placed one picture in the "Family of Man" show, a shot of a father and son lying on a couch reading newspapers that falls right into the fifties habit of portraying bourgeois American family life as entirely idyllic...
...Could the politics of every small nation in the world be discussed by all important politicians solely in terms of whether ground has been gained by "communism" if we had an enduring mental picture of real life in these places...
...By 1978, Szarkowsky was positing that "there is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration...
...He published a book, Mirrors and Windows, to prove the point, and it seemed that the mirrors had the force of history on their side...
...She and her husband were not major figures on the order of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon in fashion photography, but they were well established...
...anyway, it doesn't mean there's no hope...
...the non freaks, on the other hand, are shot from uncomfortable angles, or in harsh light, or in settings that are ostentatious and phony...
...The "Family of Man" show popularized a sentimental humanitarianism that was soon a moving force behind the civil rights movement and the establishment of the Peace Corps...
...In fact there was a growing movement toward "synthetic" photography, in which the photographer would move beyond the notion of simply exposing, developing, and printing a piece of film—in Szarkowsky's words, "For a photographer of liberal and open-minded inclination, it seemed reasonable to hedge the bet a little by drawing or painting on his photographs—or otherwise adding some evidence that he had hands as well as eyes ." Today, the feeling of excitement that attended the expansion of photography-as-art is nearly gone...
...This is certainly not an inevitable consequence of a more democratic culture...
...She explored the unconscious...
...But in its expansion, the center has also splintered...
...Her normal subjects' memories are completely different—usually bitter...
...Meanwhile, documentary photographers, who early in the century had often been camera-toting social workers (like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine), proliferated as photography became common in magazines...
...Its heyday began in the mid-1930s, when the great photography editor, Roy Stryker, moved to Washington to start his Farm Security Administration file, documenting the rural poverty of the Depression through the work of photographers like Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee...
...It would be tempting to say that this means that American photography had fallen from grace, but the truth is that today much of "Family of Man" seems schmaltzy and The Americans seems great—always offhanded, never formal, a gritty yet also elegant evocation of how the country really is...
...Using the power that is inherent in a memorable still image, it gave immediacy to remote places and events and turned causes that might have seemed abstract into human flesh and blood...
...by Nicholas Lemann Why the death of documentary photography was bad for democracy Not long ago I saw the famous old chiller, The Thing, for the first time...
...We have enormously broadened the center of American life...
...It made people in faraway predicaments almost into neighbors...
...Museums gave their photography departments more money, wall space, and staff...
...She was an artist in the way the word was meant in post-war New York, whereas Ansel Adams, while literally an artist, wasn't...
...A show at a major museum with a title like "Recent American Photography" will surely contain work that is "abstract," as that word is applied to painting—that is, nonrepresentational...
...One such institution is the public school...
...As the work gets more abstract, fewer people respond to it, and the galleries have had trouble sustaining the kind of prices that are necessary to shift the primary market for photography from magazine readers to individual art collectors...
...Not only had he managed to cast off the stagy cheerfulness that pervaded the culture in the fifties, but he had done documentary photography, then closely allied with magazine assignments, in the manner the best painters had adopted back in the 19th century, deciding what to shoot and print according to the dictates of his own creative vision, and not some editor's or client's orders...
...It continued with the birth of Life and the other great masscirculation picture magazines in the late thirties and flourished through the war years...
...One place to look for the answer is in the life and work of Diane Arbus, a crucial transitional figure who came of age photographically in the era of the great documentarians, sat at their feet, and con-sidered herself to be their legatee, but became a hero to those who see photography as most importantly a means of self-expression for the photographer...
...The three photographers in Szarkowsky's New Documents show were starting to push out the limits...
...Is the artist central, or the subject...
...in the images of those who are not, there is an aggressive and often hostile determination to wrest out the hidden truth...
...Although people who deserved to be called artists came out of both branches of magazine photography, these people were not fully able to wear the twentieth-century artist's cultural and social trappings: the studio photographers because their work was so commercial and the photojournalists because they were reporters on assignment...
...Arbus bullied them, lied to them, forced them to hold poses for hours, and otherwise pushed them until they somehow got into conformity with her vision of the world...
...Her work expressed deep, half-hidden compulsions...
...Every picture from the body of work that made her reputation is meant to demonstrate that all of us are freaks...
...Arbus transformed the Frank-style eye for upbeat material into an artist's territory of the imagination...
...It was made in 1951, at the height of the period that is now enshrined in the mythology of hat tonal politics as our golden age, and it plainly was meant to be not only entertainment but also an affirmation of the basic goodness of America...
...Two spectators at a country fair in Ohio, photographed by Ben Shahn for the Farm Security Administration Government efforts to photograph the rural poor during the Depression and the use of the great picture magazines umed causes that might have seemed abstract into human flesh and blood...
...That's too bad, but by now it's irrevocable...
...By then Collier's magazine was dead, and within ten years all the big format magazines—Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post—would die too...
...But just when the market for magazine photojournalism was drying up, it underwent a major expansion...
...She had gone beyond traditional modes of perception...
...In 1962 Steichen stepped down as the photography curator of the Museum of Modern Art and was replaced by John Szarkowsky, who still holds that job...
...and another, whose demise barely has been noticed, is documentary photography...
...What looked like its apogee, but was in fact its last hurrah, was the extraordinarily popular "Family of Man" show organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955...
...But her world also includes many "normal" people, and invariably they look strange too...
...In the summer of 1971 she killed herself...
...Nicholas Lemann is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Once the shock wore off, the appeal of Frank's work to photographers was immense...
...Photography schools multiplied...
Vol. 16 • October 1984 • No. 9
