At the “Scholar’s Gate” entrance to Central Park at 5th Avenue and 60th Street you will find a bronze statue of photographer Diane Arbus, created by sculptor Gillian Wearing, scheduled to be on exhibit until mid-August 2022. Though I have never been to a formal museum exhibit of Arbus’ photography I have always been fascinated with her work; she sought out unusual-appearing subjects, people marginalized by society, especially in the era she worked, the 1950s and 1960s, a time when conformity in habits and dress was a ticket to acceptability, society, marriage and work, things prized above all in the era.
It’s possible, for example, that her 1967 portrait of twin girls from Roselle, NY (seen on this page in the online Sleek magazine) may have influenced Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the two ghost twins in “The Shining.” She also photographed Eddie Carmel, a giant from the Bronx whose 8’9″ height would have dwarfed Andre the Giant, and trans people figured in her work long before their prominence today. A Google search turns up a decent sampler of what you will find with Arbus’ photography. She worked almost exclusively with black and white film.
Though Arbus is credited with showing marginalized people in society, there seems to be a coldness and dispassionateness to her work. Weegee worked in much the same milieu, but I find him much more empathetic than Arbus; there’s a warmness that Arbus did not express. Arbus gained rather more respectability than Weegee, as she was featured regularly in Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and London’s Sunday Times Magazine, and she earned a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Arbus once said her pictures sought to capture “the space between who someone is and who they think they are.” Diane Arbus committed suicide at the Westbeth artists’ residence in the West Village on July 28, 1971.
I am neither an art critic nor a psychoanalyst and will not offer appraisal of her work in either vein. All I can tell you is I enjoyed her work, and sometimes I wish I had the courage to do portrait photography.
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4/11/22
8 comments
Was Married to Alan Arbus who played Dr. Sidney Freedman on Mash.
Norman Mailer said giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a gun to a little kid.
Look at the way she made people look.Someone should have taken HER picture.See
how she would like it.She made people look like freaks.There was no empathy for the
people in her pictures,just a cold insect gaze.
She should have worked at the old National Enquirer,before it became a gossip sheet.
She would have been right at home
I must politely disagree with your critique of Arbus’ work. She did not make people look like freaks; they were freaks. Her photography touches a nerve because, like the Ghost of Christmas Present lifting his cloak to reveal “Ignorance” and “Want”, she has forced us to look intimately into the faces of those we have been historically unable or not wanting to view. She did not “steal” these images, like some cheap tabloid, but celebrated her subjects’ eccentricities, even becoming friends with many of them. Unlike an engineered Rockwell illustration, these photographs present a stark, unadorned image. Your derogatory emotions are solely the product of your relationship with the subject. Not hers.
An extra bonus is all your links ,they are always so interesting
To me her photos fall into the category of gross, but strangely compelling. Like the old circus side show. Tremendous talent, yet some of her images I with I had never seen.
“Gross but strangely compelling….”
You make it sound almost like the Kramer portrait on the Seinfeld show… 😉
I can’t look away
I spotted Diane Arbus wandering around Central Park with her camera many times during the late 60s. She was always alone and would stare intently at all the countercultural high school kids (like yours truly) who gathered at the Bethesda Fountain. One busy Sunday afternoon, I noticed that Arbus, Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, and the still-teenaged Janis Ian were all standing within a few feet of each other, totally oblivious to one another as they watched the passing crowd. It would have made a great photo (especially since each was facing a different direction and looked terminally bored). Unfortunately, I’d left my own camera at home.