Girl with a pointy hood and white schoolbag at the curb, N.Y.C., 1957.
“Arbus was particularly sensitive to children,” the curator Jeff L. Rosenheim said. “They’re in the process of changing their identities as they grow. She’s at the curb — the curb itself is that liminal stage.”
In his classic study of the short story “The Lonely Voice,” the Irish writer Frank O’Connor identified the primary difference between the novel and the short story as one of belonging. Novels, to put it simply, are about people trying to fit into society, while stories are about the loners, the outsiders, the kooks, those to whom society “offers no goals and no answers” and for whom the short story’s “intense awareness of human loneliness” is perfectly suited.
From practically the moment that the commercial photographer Diane Arbus set out to become an artist at the ripe age of 33 — numbering her negatives sequentially from 1 to more than 6,000 before her suicide in 1971— she seemed to know that the story of the outsider was her intellectual inheritance. And she had the uncanny ability, in a city as crowded as New York, to isolate even those who thought they belonged, to find them almost alone on a sidewalk, their eyes searching hers — later ours — fiercely and uncertainly through the camera.
“Diane Arbus: In the Beginning,” which opens July 12 at the Met Breuer, will give the first real glimpse of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century in chrysalis. Drawing from the Diane Arbus Archive, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 2007 from the artist’s daughters, Doon and Amy Arbus, the exhibition focuses on the years 1956 through 1962 and includes mostly images that have never before been exhibited or published, a huge body of work predating the pictures that have defined Arbus’s career. The show will arrive just after the publication of “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer” (Ecco), a highly anticipated and unauthorized biography by Arthur Lubow, a contributor to The New York Times, that delves deeply into the connections between Arbus’s work and her sometimes troubled life, in interviews with many friends who have never before spoken publicly about her.
Woman with white gloves and a pocketbook, N.Y.C., 1956.
JEFF L. ROSENHEIM In 2007, when I brought the archive to the museum as a gift from her two daughters, we knew that in addition to all the negatives and papers and correspondence, there were also hundreds of original works of art, vintage gelatin silver prints, primarily from 1956 to 1962, printed by her. And what was interesting was that most of those had been discovered long after the 1972 Aperture monograph that established her reputation, the square-format pictures we know so well. Arbus had a darkroom separate from her home at Westbeth in the West Village, and there were lots of boxes that had been hidden away there, on Charles Street, at the time of her death. They weren’t found until years later and not inventoried until many years later.
Old woman with hands raised in the ocean, Coney Island, N.Y., 1960.
ROSENHEIM I thought that the work had such authority. And that the genesis of this artist was something I didn’t know anything about. And wouldn’t it be interesting to see what this looked like and compare it to the larger whole. If you think of what we know of Arbus, it’s really Chapter 2. What we’re doing is Chapter 1. And the two are much more connected than you could ever imagine. The opportunity is to look at the poetics of a great artist at the beginning of her career, and if we compare that to Walker Evans, for example, or for that matter Robert Frank or Helen Levitt or Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand, when you look at their beginnings, they are very different from their middles and their ends. And Arbus’s work is really just one beautiful thing.
Woman with white gloves and a pocketbook, N.Y.C., 1956.
“We’re in the isolationist ’50s, and here’s a glamorous woman on Fifth Avenue, wearing gloves, with her pocketbook, but with this anxiety on her face.”
Jeff L. Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the museum’s photography department and organizer of the Arbus exhibition, sat down at the Metropolitan Museum last week to talk about the years of work that led to the show and about Arbus’s remarkable conviction, even in her earliest images, of what she called her own kind of “rightness and wrongness.” “The camera is cruel,” she once said, “so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.”
Little man biting woman’s breast, N.Y.C., 1958.
“We’re at a street festival, and there’s a theatrical aspect. People are performing for her. They’re having fun.”
It seems amazing that so much work by an artist of Arbus’s stature could go largely unknown for so many years. Why has it taken so long for it to come to light?
It seems amazing that so much work by an artist of Arbus’s stature could go largely unknown for so many years. Why has it taken so long for it to come to light?
Old woman with hands raised in the ocean, Coney Island, N.Y., 1960.
“There’s something ambiguous in the woman’s gesture. She could be waving or calling for help.”
What was your reaction when you started going through the prints yourself for the first time?
ROSENHEIM I thought that the work had such authority. And that the genesis of this artist was something I didn’t know anything about. And wouldn’t it be interesting to see what this looked like and compare it to the larger whole. If you think of what we know of Arbus, it’s really Chapter 2. What we’re doing is Chapter 1. And the two are much more connected than you could ever imagine. The opportunity is to look at the poetics of a great artist at the beginning of her career, and if we compare that to Walker Evans, for example, or for that matter Robert Frank or Helen Levitt or Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand, when you look at their beginnings, they are very different from their middles and their ends. And Arbus’s work is really just one beautiful thing.
Empty snack bar, N.Y.C., 1957.
“She was often looking in from outside. The street was the pathway to the private world.”
How does it look and feel like Arbus (of whom Norman Mailer once said, in a famously backhanded compliment, that giving a camera to her was like giving a hand grenade to a baby) even in the first images?
ROSENHEIM There are many pictures from her first 50 rolls of film in the show. And you can see for yourself that she is already isolating individuals, pedestrians on Fifth Avenue. She is approaching people, and in almost every instance, it’s one image and the subject is addressing the camera. Arbus did not want to do what almost every one of her peers was doing, which she was highly aware of — she was well versed in the history of the medium; she was taking classes from Lisette Model and she had studied with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch. What she took away from that training was this feeling that she could find her subject and they could find her in equal measure. She allowed herself to be vulnerable enough. Helen Levitt used a right-angle viewfinder so her subjects couldn’t see what she was doing. Walker Evans used the folds of his coat to hide his camera on the subway. The style of documentary photography was that you wanted to see but you didn’t want to be seen, and Arbus had a completely different method. It was to use the camera as an expressive device that allows the viewer of the photograph to be implicated by the subject looking directly at the artist.
Blonde receptionist behind a picture window, N.Y.C., 1962.
ROSENHEIM I think Arbus was suggesting that just as people are looking at us and we’re looking at them every day, the pictures made us introspective as viewers. They forced us to confront our own identity. And that’s a really beautiful switch, that switcheroo. We’re looking at somebody else but we’re mindful of our voyeurism, and we’re mindful of how we ourselves are presenting. ‘How am I different? How did I become the person I am?’ That’s one of the qualifying elements of an Arbus photograph: that you feel something about you, often something that might not be comfortable.
Screaming woman with blood on her hands, 1961.
Child teasing another, N.Y.C., 1960.
“She’s interested in how we choose our others, how we choose to behave in public.”
ROSENHEIM There are many pictures from her first 50 rolls of film in the show. And you can see for yourself that she is already isolating individuals, pedestrians on Fifth Avenue. She is approaching people, and in almost every instance, it’s one image and the subject is addressing the camera. Arbus did not want to do what almost every one of her peers was doing, which she was highly aware of — she was well versed in the history of the medium; she was taking classes from Lisette Model and she had studied with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch. What she took away from that training was this feeling that she could find her subject and they could find her in equal measure. She allowed herself to be vulnerable enough. Helen Levitt used a right-angle viewfinder so her subjects couldn’t see what she was doing. Walker Evans used the folds of his coat to hide his camera on the subway. The style of documentary photography was that you wanted to see but you didn’t want to be seen, and Arbus had a completely different method. It was to use the camera as an expressive device that allows the viewer of the photograph to be implicated by the subject looking directly at the artist.
Blonde receptionist behind a picture window, N.Y.C., 1962.
“This is the transition year, when she changed to square format. The receptionist is in a kind of diorama, not one made by the woman but by the culture.”
Why did that matter so much to her?
ROSENHEIM I think Arbus was suggesting that just as people are looking at us and we’re looking at them every day, the pictures made us introspective as viewers. They forced us to confront our own identity. And that’s a really beautiful switch, that switcheroo. We’re looking at somebody else but we’re mindful of our voyeurism, and we’re mindful of how we ourselves are presenting. ‘How am I different? How did I become the person I am?’ That’s one of the qualifying elements of an Arbus photograph: that you feel something about you, often something that might not be comfortable.
Screaming woman with blood on her hands, 1961.
“This is a shot inside a theater, of a movie called ‘Horrors of the Black Museum.’ The woman is using binoculars and when she focuses, daggers come out and blind her.”
The longtime criticism of Arbus, by Susan Sontag among others, was that she was often producing that effect — her art — at the expense of her subjects, the sideshow freaks and cross-dressers she sought out. Will this show change anyone’s mind about that?
ROSENHEIM I feel that when I look at these pictures the effect is of the gaze that people strike when they catch a glimpse of themselves in a picture window or a mirror when they’re not expecting it. It’s their split-second performative response to themselves. Whether it is what they are or not, it’s what they seem to be. And I think in a certain sense each of her subjects seemed to gain some self-knowledge from that experience, the experience of being photographed by Arbus.
“She’s interested in how we choose our others, how we choose to behave in public.”
