Art: To Hades with Lens

“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been,” said Diane Arbus; in the summer of 1971, aged 48, she killed herself. Before her death she was beginning to be recognized in art circles as the photographer who had subjected the hallucinated blankness of urban life, mostly in and around New York, where she was born and lived, to a uniquely truthful scrutiny, like Eurydice with a lens in the tunnel to Hades. A year has passed, and now Arbus is as much a cult figure as Sylvia Plath; a collection of her photographs is due to be published this fall, and the Museum of Modern Art has given her a posthumous retrospective. It is by far the most moving show in what, to date, has been a generally boring art season in Manhattan. For Arbus did what hardly seemed possible for a still photographer. She altered our experience of the face.

Arbus’ vision was exactly opposite to the flabby Family of Man attitude that still governs most photographic responses to the human animal. Everyman is a poor subject. There is compromise in the very act of shooting a person as if he or she were “really the same as me”; it means a flattening of human experience, a generality that amounts to well-meant condescension. In brief, it is sentiment. In her passion for “not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like,” Diane Arbus became perhaps the least sentimental photographer who ever caught a face in the view finder. She refused to generalize. There was no family, and the unshared particularity of her subjects was recorded as it lay, dense, mediocre and impenetrable. “What I’m trying to describe,” she declared, “is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not your own.”

Not even loneliness is shared by the extraordinary cast of freaks, hustlers, staring twins, leathery nudists and child dancing champions who populate Arbus’ prints. Loneliness merely exists among them. Arbus’ people own no common baggage and barely even possess themselves. Her theme was not so much personality as defensiveness; the limits of human gesture amazed her. “Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way, and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw…Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.” Arbus probed that disjuncture as no other has done.

Diane Arbus was no outsider herself. Her father, David Nemerov, was the owner of a clothing store on Fifth Avenue, her brother Howard a widely respected poet. At 18 she married Allan Arbus, and for nearly two decades they were successful partners in fashion photography. Then they separated. Diane moved to Greenwich Village with her two daughters. Already, she had begun to take photographs that had nothing to do with fashion.

Her work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was: the flat, documentary exactness, the stiff poses, the unforgiving hardness and clarity, the cumulative sense of a world made of irrevocably distinct objects. To call this “alienation” is to impose a Freudian cliché on a rigorously subtle and devious poetic experience. Of course one is repelled, and so to a degree alienated, by some of the portraits Arbus brought back from her descent into America, for they represent sympathy at the end of its tether. Yet there had to be a major artist—who also, it seems, had to be a woman—to remind us that the varicose drag queen and the freak’s hump also call for something more than inspection, and that in denying them our concern, we deny our community.