Diane Arbus: Revelations

Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, October 2005, revisited November 2005.

“Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was once a pupil of Lisette Model, an Austrian-born photographer who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. Model’s repertoire included character shots of what were unkindly called ‘freaks’ and others on the margins of society; Arbus took to this genre and made it her own.

The Revelations exhibition, (V&A, October 2005-January 2006) gave us the opportunity to see not only the work of 'Diane Arbus, freak-show photographer' but also the much, much broader range of images for which she is less well-known in the wider public domain.

Whilst none of her photographs could be described as banal, unchallenging or even picturesque – they tax the mind of the viewer, each and every one – they do nevertheless cover the entire range of humanity from the cradle to the grave and, as such, give us a much broader perspective on mid-twentieth century life than we might expect from a less provocative photographer. We see people who operate on the fringe, live unconventional lives, cause us to look, and then look again just to make sure we’ve got it right. Diane Arbus had an uncanny talent for spotting the person who was just out of step with the rest of humanity, just a little bit different, just unusual enough to make us stand and stare.

Her images of children are invariably as disturbing as those she took of adults – there is no ‘aaah!’ factor in Arbus’ work. By way of example, there is a photograph of a young boy staring somewhat menacingly at the camera whilst clutching a toy grenade in his right hand. His other hand is contorted into a clawed shape, as if he imagined he was holding another one. What I find disturbing about this image, apart from the issues surrounding boys and weapons, is the clever placing of the young (innocent, oblivious) family in the background. In reality, the boy’s stance and facial expression have more to do with impatience with Diane Arbus than with any real malintent, but knowing that spoils the impact of the shot.

In Photography, a Cultural History, (Laurence King, 2003) Mary Warner Marien says that “Arbus turned normalcy on its head, making the ordinary bizarre and naturalising the unusual” (p352). She certainly had an eye for off-beat, producing striking images which, Marien suggests, “were symbols of her own psychological fragility and trauma”. We know that Arbus led a troubled enough life to commit suicide when in her forties, so perhaps her predisposition to taking contentious and sometimes shocking photographs was, all along, indicative of her inner turmoil.

In her book Light Matters - Writings on Photography (Aperture, 2005) Vicki Goldberg's take on Arbus' work is that she "embraced the entire spectrum of society, from the dim stars of sideshows to the optical illusions of transvestites, from the unpublishable bodies of nudists to the neglected inner lives of pampered conformists, all within on unified field of humanity." Goldberg sums up Arbus' approach thus: "Her photographs imply, subversively, not only that all men are created equal but that each and every one of us is an exceptional individual".

In The Photograph (Oxford, 1997) Graham Clarke discusses in some detail the inferences we can make when examining another Arbus image: ‘Identical Twins, 1967’. On first viewing, as when I saw it at the exhibition, this is a photograph about ‘sameness’, about being identical. But closer scrutiny reveals that there are in fact several things which make the two girls in the photograph different from each other. They wear, for example, differently patterned tights. The girl on the left, Cathleen, looks more sullen, and has droopy eyes, whereas her sister, Colleen, looks much the brighter and more cheerful twin. Clarke sees this image as an example of how difficult it is to photograph meaning; he says that there is a “gap between what we see in the photograph and what we are asked to view”. He points out that there a few contextual clues in the image: we cannot see the location (other than that the girls are standing on a paved area), we cannot determine their height and can only guess at their age. “Arbus has effectively neutralised their terms of existence” (p29). The more we look a the image, Clarke says, the more it becomes apparent that these identical twins are in fact very different from each other, to the point where the image could be renamed ‘Different Twins’.

Helayne Seidman/The Washington Post

My reaction to this image (when seeing it for the first time ‘in the flesh’ at the Revelations exhibition) was one of consolidation: being able to see in the large print - singly placed on its own wall space - all the details so frequently referred to in texts (such as the differently patterned tights). I began to appreciate the differences as well as the similarities in these two girls, and could understand why Clarke might have difficulty asserting that a photograph such as this “exists within a wider body of reference and relates to a series of wider histories, at once aesthetic, cultural and social” (p29).

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