Diane Arbus: Two New Books: Revelations and Family Albums
2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoTwo new Arbus books. Review of Diane Arbus: Revelations. Random House, 2003. Anthony Lee and John Pultz. Diane Arbus: Family Albums. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Until recently New York photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was most commonly associated with the depiction of freaks--transvestites, dwarves, giants, circus performers, and eccentrics. Mythologized as a Sylvia Plath with a camera who exploited the abject psychological trauma of her sitters, Arbus's work has most often read as a self-portrait of sorts, an investigation of her own, often sordid, neuroses through a new approach to journalistic reportage. Perhaps unwittingly, John Szarkowski spawned this reading of Arbus through her inclusion in the 1967 exhibition entitled New Documents at MoMA, in which Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander were presented as street documentarians whose authorial presence was more tangible in the photograph than in previous documentary photography. These three photographers were united, according to Szarkowski, by the marriage of documentary photography and psychological investigation. According to the bulk of Arbus scholarship, both Arbus and her subjects had an intimate point of identification that met halfway in the photograph; the photograph bore testimony to a novel closeness that Arbus was able to achieve with her sitters. Through her flattering and cajoling, she rendered them defenseless before rapidly clicking her Rolleiflex. The relative lack of published material on Arbus has done little to broaden this reading that does nothing to situate Arbus as a seminal voice within the artistic and cultural context of the sixties. It is almost as if Arbus is not allowed to exist outside of the frame of the image. Two new books on Arbus are entitled Revelations (Random House, 2003)--it accompanies a major exhibition of Arbus's photographs (the exhibition opened in October at SF MoMA, and will be in New York at the Metropolitan Museum in the spring of 2005)--and Diane Arbus: Family Albums (Yale, 2003)--a show at New York University's Grey Art Gallery this fall. Both have a tendency to enervate the currently flaccid Arbus scholarship with a cornucopia of never-before-seen photographs, and new scholarly readings. Arbus's tragic suicide in 1971 came at a point when she had not yet assembled her large body of work into any thematic structure. These books represent attempts to deal with the fragments of Arbus's short but extraordinary career. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Revelations is aptly titled, as its content is illuminating in terms of what was both in front of and behind Arbus's persistent camera. By re-printing some of her personal letters, notebooks, proposals, family photographs, and other writings, Revelations presents a closer look at Arbus's thought processes. With the inclusion of many previously unpublished yet visually arresting photographs and contact sheets, this book aptly illustrates Arbus's statement that really believe that there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them. The contact sheets reveal subjects at ease with Arbus--each sitting recorded of an encounter, in most instances, with someone she had just met. She excelled at cajoling her subjects. Marvin Israel, Arbus's close friend and collaborator, spoke of Arbus's approach to a subject as a performance or event, suggesting there a conceptual affinity to performance art in the 1960s. Not that Arbus was a performance artist, but her work does have parallel concerns: artists whom we tend not to think of as Arbus's contemporaries, such as Carole Schneemann, Bruce Nauman, Alan Kaprow, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono, among others, have used the body, either their own or someone else's, as their chosen medium. They used their bodies to challenge modernist formalism, traditional relationships between artist and medium, and the boundaries between artist, spectator, and mass culture. …
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