Diane Arbus, Untitled
Much is made of the death of an artist, especially if it is a suicide. Curators, critics, friends, family and subsequent generations of artists are left to sift through the ephemera left behind in an attempt to piece together the impulse and understand the finality of such a drastic decision. Diane Arbus remains one of those figures, a woman whose work has thrilled viewers, mystified many, and challenged classifications of normalcy and societal privilege through its broad examination of alternative archetypes.
What is difficult about photography, and more specifically portraiture, is that it always rests on the surface of things. In most cases it can only offer a fragmentary indication of wider social, cultural, and political truths derived from its historical context. This indication, a way of pointing at the world and making evidence of it, is paired with the artists subjective impulse, a desire to go here, explore there, and retrieve insights that are interlaced with a complex series of thoughts, the majority of which are never made public.
Beyond conceiving of an artist’s intentions, there is the work, and Arbus’ portraits are simple and direct. Her body of work as a whole reminds us that portraiture’s primary aim is an assertion of existence. As Arbus states, and I concur in my own practice, oftentimes a photograph is an excuse to have an experience. I think this practice is about entrance into the world of another and the resulting conclusion is always and ineffably, you exist, and because I am picturing you, I exist, and somehow from this interaction, we will mutually divulge this existence as a record of our shared humanity. There is as well subject as object, subject as self-reflection, and subject as example of larger social ramifications. Yet in the end it is a hybrid combination of psychological motives that compels a photographer to engage with others, the trace of which is a subtle exposition of power dynamics between the two participants.
When the subject is obviously at a disadvantage, whether it be economic oppression, incarceration, mental instability, or the like, this dynamic is reflected in the artists’ approach. Subtle nuances of empathy, identification with, criticism of, or exploitation is always apparent in the final result. It is the photographer who determines the frame, and it is the photographer that decides what to highlight and what to negate, thus controlling the means by which the viewer will understand the subject. As Sontag postulates, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power.” The subject’s sole response to this appropriation is reflected in their gaze. The eyes that stare out at us from portraits show the confrontation between photographer and subject, whether they trust who is portraying, are frustrated with them, complicit or contradictory. It is this relationship that primarily determines the emotional thrust of an image, and whether or not the photographer is a participant in, or an observer of the lives of their subjects can determine the depth of this emotional exposition.
In some way, every subject photographed becomes an integral part of a photographer’s life. The process of photographing is one of magnification. It heightens the photographer’s awareness of what they are looking at, and with a resulting emblem of this interaction, the photographer is made privy to their initial reflection countless times thereafter, returning the mind to that subject, forcing them to contemplate it again, reassess their memories, and in effect, enter again into the instance in which they took the picture. It has always been an intuitive and underlying supposition of mine, that Arbus killed herself because of her last body of work, a series of images that remain aptly named, “Untitled” for she was never capable of labeling them with identifying traits before her death.
From 1969-71 she visited homes for the mentally disabled and made portraits of people at play, dressed up for Halloween, with their friends and alone. The majority of these images are taken in a vast field, with little in the background, as if to foreground the hallucinatory world that her subjects inhabited, something not quite connected to reality, a mental space that remained undisclosed, cordoned off and impenetrable to “functioning” society that engaged itself with politics, economics and social hierarchies. Her portraits of the disabled are romantic and visionary, suggesting that the fringe is what she sought, and the fringe is where she found herself, and the guilt, awkwardness, and necessity of identifying herself with this marginalized community ultimately took her to a metaphysical space from which she could not return. Or at least this is my fantasy of her final days.
What you record you become in effect, and occupying “civilized” society, or what we deem sane and decorous is oftentimes shockingly perverse, even if this fact goes unrecognized. Arbus sought to illuminate these gaps by portraying the eccentricity of the uptown elite, a little boy playing in the park, lovers engaged in an embrace, while normalizing the alternative components of our society such as strippers, dwarves, circus performers and nudists in an attempt to reassess our definition of humanity. With Untitled, she moves beyond these categorizations. Her final portraits are unusual ones, because they do not invert archetypes or reveal much, but rather they hint at the unknown nether regions of the mind, moving farther out away from the center, towards the incomprehensible. Ultimately this brought Arbus to the nonsensical truth that the very structures that implicitly hold our society together are wrought with falsehoods and that another world exists in which play and fantasy are the norm. In her death, Arbus leaves us at an indeterminate point, somewhere out in that field, photographing strangers that may speak the same language, but that occupy a space beyond words.
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