Review: Diane Arbus @ Tate Modern
Although Diane Arbus stated that her desire as a photographer was to ‘photograph everybody’ her work is inextricably linked to the freakish side of humanity, in two ways. Firstly in the sense of the pejorative label applied to people on the margins of society, the abnormal, the disabled, people living in contravention of social norms. These were the people Arbus made her name photographing. Secondly freakish in the sense that even when Arbus turned her camera on ‘ordinary’ people she managed to capture them as abnormal in their own way. She feared she would be remembered as a photographer of freaks, but her greatest strength was in showing that in a sense we are all freaks, all abnormal, and that this is normal.
Arbus was born in New York in 1923 to wealthy Jewish parents who were heavily involved in the arts. She married aged eighteen and set up a commercial photography business with her husband, but by the end of the fifties her marriage and her work in commercial photography ended. Instead she moved towards portraiture and documentary photography and worked on assignment for magazines until 1963 when she was awarded a Gugenheim fellowship to investigate ‘America rites, manners and customs’. Arbus’s work was typified by a strong relationships with her subjects, quite at odds with the shoot and run approach of many photographers of the time. She spent time getting to know them before photographing them, and stayed in contact with many of them for years, often rephotographing them.
It’s hard to pass comment on such a diverse collection of images, although they can be loosely broken down into photographs of normal and abnormal people, and the contrast between these two types of subjects is what struck me most. Untitled, a series of photographs she took of people with learning difficulties is particularly remarkable. In several taken around Halloween her subjects wear masks, and it’s hard viewing these images not to read all sorts of subtexts into them. The mask as an analogy for false exteriors and false perception, hiding the internal reality. The masked patients are strange, frightening, wild. In one image they huddle together almost like a herd of some unknown animal. The contrast with the following images of them without masked is profound, in these images they laugh and smile and play, they are completely and unquestionably human.
Arbus is invariably sympathetic in the way she photographs people who are outside of the mainstream. By contrast ‘normal’ people seem to be depicted far more harshly in her images, perhaps because in her photographs they often appear more as symbols than as individuals. One particularly iconic photograph shows a young man holding an American flag and wearing a patriotic badge reading ‘I’m proud’. His face is caught contorted, his eyes gaze off into the distance. The whole image suggest someone caught in paroxysms of patriotic ecstasy, so taken up in membership of the nation that they are unable to act as an individual or as an agent of their own destiny. Another famous image shows a young boy, posed in a contorted and unnatural way, and clutching in one hand a toy hand grenade. Taken in 1962 as the first American troops were arriving in Vietnam the message is unmistakeable.
What is also interesting is that Arbus’s abnormal subjects frequently seem so much more confident than her normal subjects. Perhaps used to the harshly curious, interrogating gaze of other people, the giants and dwarves she photographed seem to regard the camera’s gaze as familiar and unthreatening. Most of them appear totally natural, almost self-confident. One image that exemplifies this shows a semi-nude man, his smiling face, pencil moustache and jaunty hat exude confidence. Looking down the frame it becomes clear his body is tiny, he is a dwarf. By contrast many of her normal subjects appear caught off guard or nervous. Some shield their faces, others look surprised. There are relatively few straight portraits of the normal.
Arbus suffered lifelong depression and killed herself in 1971. As I mentioned at the start of this blog she said she feared being remembered only as a photographer of freaks. The tragedy of her work is that it still does all too easily become a sort of photographic freak show. I was slightly shocked to overhear three people make fairly unpleasant remarks about several of her subjects in the half an hour I was in the gallery. For all that her photographs do to show that we are as humans essentially all the same, and for all the changes in attitude since the period when she was photographing, for some people her work seems to have more merit as a photographic compendium of the abnormal.
The Diane Arbus exhibition is on in the Artist Rooms at the Tate Modern until November 6th 2011.
