Diane Arbus
Posted by Aspasia Stephanou on May 02, 2010 in Blog tagged withA Page from Diane Arbus’s 1964 Diary: “Plans to do: Racial pimps (sic), teenagers, family, gangsters, homosexual, weddings, whores, pimps, Rock n’ Roll group, old people’s club…”
Like the sadistic and exploitative gaze of an Andy Warhol, who “deserved” to die according to Valerie Solanas, the photographic freak images by Diane Arbus, exhibited at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, reveal a similar sadomasochistic quality. Images taken in the 1960s and early 1970s before her suicide in 1971 portray the sadness of marginal people in their surroundings.
There is Jack Dracula, who performed at Hubert’s Museum as the “Tattooed Man” in the 1960s, with tattoos such as the names Boris Karloff and Dracula inscribed on his skin and images of bats, Dracula and Frankenstein. There are photographs of twins and other subjects in blurred and dark surroundings enclosing their claustrophobic lives. For example Arbus received criticism because of the perception that she was too manipulative and that her desire to present people as freaks overwhelmed the subjects themselves. In the case of the twins photograph Arbus made the girls stand so close together they looked like conjoined twins, but they were not. In this way Arbus’s art overtook the reality of the twins’ life.
There is nothing positive or promising in these photographs; only the torn lives of people or their empty gaze pointing to a haunting past or a futile future. Their story does not matter for Arbus. She arguably stole the lives of her subjects to invigorate her career. In the gallery space the spectator is surrounded by insignificant others. We will never hear about or see them again, they don’t matter, perhaps they are already dead, as they were possibly for Arbus after their photograph was taken. The gallery asserts the message that Arbus loved her subjects and the claim that she was sympathetic to their condition is repeated. Maybe there is a sense of guilt following her photographs, of her consuming appetites to categorize certain people as freaks and then sell them. Jack Dracula, talking about Arbus, refers to her insistence that she take photographs of him for free and also his fears of the material being misused, misinterpreted by the artist and her “cultivated” viewer. Sontag wrote that Arbus’s subjects were “people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive” and that the photographs were taken “based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other”. These others fascinated Arbus because perhaps, they reflected the way she saw her own self.
A flower girl at a wedding in Connecticut (1964) becomes through Arbus’s eyes a tormented character in a gothic setting, a ghostly figure in a funereal landscape:
“A Castle in Disneyland” (1962) (which is not included in this exhibition) plays with the illusion of the image but also with the exploitation of mainstream culture of the gothic and consequently with Arbus’s exploitation of the spectacle:
This image, like the following one, focuses on what is missing, on lack, on absence.
The gothic “A House on a Hill” is full of absence, of people, of life, of New York, of the things that should be there but are not. A facade of a house that is not, a Hollywood setting perhaps, an illusion. Arbus liked the idea of masks, of masking, of the illusion of the image.
Her tortured self is maybe more present in these photographs than her subjects were. The emptiness of the steel, cold images of black and white tell the story of someone that found death more promising than life itself.
Diane Arbus Exhibition, Artist Rooms, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh 13th March-13th June 2010
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Will need to go and see this, looks interesting!
Yes, I definitely think you’re right about the commercial exploitation of otherness, fashioned freakery. While the gap of distance you mention is definitely created by Arbus to exploit the subject, it is also, I think, measured by the subject’s own gaze of mistrust. I think you can definitely see this in the photos of Dracula Man and the twins.
Do you think this is the their own defiance against categorisation, a defence against the viewer’s pre-rendered or presupposed prejudice, or is it merely another tool of Arbus in her staging of otherness?
Thanks Stuart. I think it could be both. Some photos do reveal the mistrust as you said, but others show the subjects performing their own sense of selfhood freely, trusting Arbus’s gaze. In some degreee i would agree with you and say it was a conscious skill used by Arbus – the result of the photographs depends on her way of seeing the world from a position that excludes people with difference. Some of the subjects do not see themselves as freaks, and perhaps they are not, but Arbus’s gaze changes that. She is fascinated with them, but her fascination is one based on the opposition between power/advantage and disadvantage. She plays with this, and stages otherness in a way that forces the spectator to agree with her. They are others, as if it is a fact for her, and wants the spectator’s gaze to confirm that. I found unsettling photographs of people from mental clinics staged as others, calling forth a sadness that is immediately related to pity, again a result of our difference and Arbus’s – we are better than them. It is hard to disentagle youself as a spectator from such photographs-the coded meaning insists and is powerful. So indeed she chooses to do so- and her gaze is more powerful than perhaps the mistrust of the subject.
After seeing the exhibition for myself this afternoon, I think the idea rings true that both her subjects and Arbus herself create the otherness identities displayed through her photography. Her sense of horror is one which I think reveals power being exchanged between photographer and photographed: Gothic as masks, tattoos or stages, as a pop-culture decoration placed or inscribed upon the social body of America, Americans and outsiders, either by herself, her subjects, or a combination of both.