Diane Arbus and the Too-Revealing Detail

A photographer’s legacy, though, is not like a painter’s: Arbus didn’t leave signed prints hanging around, like canvases drying in a storeroom. Instead, faced with more than seven thousand rolls of film, the estate has printed pictures that, for the most part, Arbus herself had printed either on commission or for herself. (Regrettably, “Constellation” does not indicate which, if any, the estate alone selected.) Arbus raised eyebrows, and hackles, for looking at people who were not previously considered fit for photographic consideration—her “butterfly collection” of those she identified, using a word that has been wielded against her ever since, as “freaks.” Her pictures posed questions of consent and agency before those words were fashionable. But her own legacy has necessarily been managed by others. As Arbus has turned from butterfly collector into butterfly, she has, like her subjects, had little say over the process.

In her lifetime, Arbus’s work was seen more often in the pages of magazines than on the walls of museums, with the notable exception of “New Documents,” a 1967 exhibition at MOMA where she was shown alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. The three were presented as a new generation of photographers who departed from a socially oriented documentary mode (think Dorothea Lange) to make something more personal. “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it,” the curator, John Szarkowski, wrote. But it was Arbus’s retrospective at MOMA, the year after her suicide—and, inevitably, the suicide itself—that shocked the world into awareness of her work.

Soon after that show, which is currently being restaged at the David Zwirner gallery in Los Angeles, battle lines were drawn. Some critics celebrated her as a humanist visionary; others saw an art monster. Her most notorious detractor was Susan Sontag, who, in a 1973 essay that drips with personal animus, accused Arbus—daughter of a department-store executive—of having a privileged girl’s prurient interest in the illicit and obscene, along with an unacceptably bleak view of America as one big “idiot village.” Sontag failed to mention the less-than-glamorous photographs Arbus made, possibly for an Esquire piece, of the writer and her son, David Rieff. One is included in “Constellation”; it hangs above “The House of Horrors, Coney Island, N.Y. 1961,” a picture that shows how absurd bogeymen look when the lights are on.

Sontag inaugurated an ad-feminam tradition that has continued ever since, and every Arbus show needs, somehow, to clear the air. In one room at the Armory, you can watch a video, drawn from talks given in Arles by Selkirk and Darius Himes, the head of photography at Christie’s, entitled “What Diane Arbus Wasn’t Doing, And How She Wasn’t Doing it,” which debunks seven “misunderstandings” about the photographer. She had “no sociopolitical agenda,” we are told. She used the word “freaks” strictly to refer to people who work in freak shows. And, lest you think otherwise, dear viewer, the photographs are “not judgmental.” Fortunately, the exhibition—nearly free of biographical baggage—trusts us to judge for ourselves.

In the late fifties and early sixties, Arbus shot in 35-mm., the format of photojournalism. Though a number of those earlier pictures are unmistakably hers—say, her Magrittean riddle “The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961”—many could have been by Robert Frank or Helen Levitt. Things changed when she started using a wide-format Rolleiflex and, later, a twin-lens Mamiyaflex, which, held at waist-level rather than in front of the face, allow for more connection but also require more intention. In a way, Arbus stepped backward in photographic time, and down, away from the gauziness of postwar art photography and toward the unvarnished aesthetic of everyday life. She rediscovered the crime-scene chiaroscuro of Weegee at the same time as she harked back to the young medium’s not-so-old masters: Mathew Brady’s posed portraiture from the nineteenth century, August Sander’s careful study of German social types from the twenties, and Walker Evans’s noble sharecroppers from the thirties. If her 35-mm. shots are taken, her more mature, square pictures are made, the result not just of technique (including a savvy use of the flash) but of prolonged, trusting encounters with her subjects. Around 1965, she began printing her photos with a thick black border left by the edge of the film, evidence that they hadn’t been cropped. From 1969 on, she preferred slightly blurred edges, reiterating the photograph’s status not as document but as art.

Arbus used the lens as a tool less for changing your mind than for opening your eyes. “Our whole guise is like giving a sign for the world to think of us in a certain way,” she once wrote, “but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.” The “mysterious” process of photography—a bit like psychoanalysis—could make visible this “gap between intention and effect.” Just as our words mean more than we say, our image exposes more than we consciously reveal.

You can see the gap clearly in the only legible constellation in “Constellation,” the famous pictures from “A Box of Ten Photographs,” Arbus’s single attempt to put together a portfolio for sale. (She found only three buyers, but they included Jasper Johns and Richard Avedon.) Humery justly groups these well-known photographs—a glum king and queen of a nursing-home prom, a “Mexican dwarf” in his hotel room, rakishly splayed on a bed wearing nothing but a black fedora and a towel—in a loose semicircle, at an angle to the otherwise gridlike layout of the show. It’s particularly worth lingering over “Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1962,” a tragedy starring a tinselled pine and a plastic-wrapped lampshade. A chair’s two armrests intrude on the shag carpet at the bottom of the frame, subtly suggesting the photographer’s presence. Arbus’s portraits are always also portraits of a place, filled with details that tell too much. We read this sorry room with the same attention we’d apply to its inhabitants, maybe more.