Diane Arbus: a flash of familiarity
It is 38 years since Diane Arbus took the blade of a razor to her wrists. In the sticky summer heat, whilst her lover was weekending with his wife on Fire Island; her daughters Doon, then 26, in Paris and Amy, 17, in Massachusetts, she swallowed a fistful of sedatives and climbed into the bath to die. Just shy of fifty, Arbus was at the very height of her creative prowess. Since then, she has undergone a virtual apotheosis, revered for the deft and daring way in which she handled the freakish side of life. Before Diane Arbus photography was primarily visual. After Diane Arbus, it was explicitly, confrontationally, psychological. Chances are you will know many of the images she is (in)famous for, because they are some of the most visually assaulting ever to hemorrhage from a camera: the furious little boy with the hand grenade; the Jewish giant with parents agog; the spectral trio of Russian dwarves At Home; the one with the man with seven huge dressmaking pins puncturing his cheeks and woven into the loose folds of his neck. But chances are too, that you will never have actually stood in front of one. Bar the magnificent SFMOMA/ V&A collaboration in 2003/5, there has been just one other touring retrospective of her work and that was nearly forty years ago. Her eldest daughter Doon's near blackout of the images in the name of "protecting them from an onslaught of theory and interpretation" is well documented. How fortunate we are, then, to be the beneficiaries of not one but two outings of her work this summer. From 9th and 20th of this month, the National Museum Cardiff and Timothy Taylor respectively, will present selections of the Arbus archive. This serendipitous collusion – Cardiff part the Artist Rooms collection acquired by the nation last year, and Taylor acting as her commercial representative in Europe (prints are on sale for up to $400,000) – also offers two different approaches. "When you offer a retrospective of an artist" explains Taylor "it encourages a historical, backward-looking vantage point. But however rewarding this is, it's important that we remember how much Arbus is of the moment; part of the artworld".
Born Diane Nemerov in 1923 to well-heeled Jewish kin, her privileged childhood was something she was ever-after escaping from. She said she felt "doomed…[the] family fortune always seemed to me humiliating". Her foraging among the seamier precincts of New York "My favourite thing is to go where I've never been" was perhaps understandable, but led to accusations of Rich Girl Slumming; voyeur. Susan Sontag thought her work ''based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other'' finding only ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive.'' At first it seems Sontag might have a point: Arbus's pictures are devoid of empathy and furtively, even uncomfortably absorbing. But this is only half the story. Listen to Arbus herself: "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". They have ''a quality of legend'' about them, ''like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.'' She venerated, even idolised them. The key to her work is understanding that there was nothing sneaky about it. In 1984, for Newsweek, Douglas Davis wrote: "They are the result of a long, complex and intensely human process. No one can go into the street tomorrow and take a Diane Arbus photograph. What made her pictures great was everything that happened before she pressed the button". She spent ten years getting to know the giant Eddie Carmel before she took her photograph of him. "If I were just curious" she explained "it would be very hard to say to someone, 'I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life'. I mean people are going to say, "You're crazy." Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid". She must have had a gift for it because many of the pictures are titled "in her bedroom" or "at home". And her subjects face the camera straight, absolutely aware of their collaboration. It makes the encounter the most important part of the picture. "The most valuable thing wasn't the photograph itself" said her lover Marvin Israel "it was the event, the experience... the photograph is like her trophy – it's what she received as the reward for this adventure". It's not just her encounter though, it's also ours. We might feel unnerved, but it's not the subject, it's the extraordinary familiarity she has captured as the flash popped.
