A bit of an obsession with Diane Arbus

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Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. © Estate of Diane Arbus

I seem to have developed a bit of an obsession with Diane Arbus of late. I think it started when I read about the exhibition: Diane Arbus. In the beginning at the Met Breuer. Of course I’d seen some of her more famous pictures (the twins; the boy with the hand grenade; etc.) but I didn’t really know much about her. I felt like reading something about photography so I browsed around on Amazon.com and came up with this: Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer and bought the Kindle version. I don’t usually buy electronic versions of photography books because I like to see the photographs in their full glory. However, the reviews of this book indicated that there were no Arbus photographs in it because the author hadn’t been able to obtain rights to use them. So I figured I wasn’t losing much by getting the e-book. It was an interesting (and long – coming in at over 700 pages) read, but I missed not having the photographs.

So I thought I’d get a book with Arbus photographs and bought: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition . This book is virtually the opposite to the Lubow book in that it’s almost all photographs and virtually no text. What little text there is is mostly in the form of Arbus’s words taken from interviews and recorded lessons. She apparently didn’t like to teach (doing it mostly for the money it brought in) and doesn’t seem to have been particularly good at it. It’s more a series of disjointed thoughts than anything else. The pictures are impressive though.

Finally I found a number of articles on the internet, the most interesting of which was: Freak Show by Susan Sontag. Where Lubow is largely postitive towards Arbus’s work Sontag is much more negative saying at one point:

The ambiguity of Diane Arbus’s work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography’s most visible enterprises—concentrating on victims, the unfortunate, the dispossessed—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

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After all of this what do I think about Arbus? Her reputation certainly doesn’t come from her photographic technique. The exposure isn’t always right. Composition seems to be off. Her fans are effusive about her ability to bring out the “inner person”. In “Looking at Photographs” John Szarkowski says of her:

With rare exceptions, Arbus made photographs only of people. The force of these portraits may be a measure of the degree to which the subject and the photographer agreed to risk trust and acceptance of each other. She was interested in them for what they were most specifically: not representatives of philosophical postitions or life styles of physiological types, but as unique mysteries. Her subjects surely perceived this, and revealed themselves without reserve, confident that they were not being used as conscripts to serve an exterior issue. They were also doubtless interested in her. At times it may have been unclear which was the mariner and which the wedding guest.

While this may be true for many of the “freak” pictures I don’t believe this is the case with many of her pictures of “normal” people. As described in the Lubow book she often used techniques (making people wait; making them hold poses for very long periods of time; making the sessions excessively long etc.) designed to frustrate and annoy. The famous picture of the boy with the hand grenade may serve as an example. The contact sheet containing this picture is available on the internet. It contains 12 photographs, 11 of which show the boy. In ten of these he looks like a perfectly normal child. Arbus chose to use the twelfth picture where he looks like a psychopath. Did she capture his inner personality (Lubow interviewed the child for his book and he certainly doesn’t seem to have become a psychopath) or did she “cherry pick” a picture where he finally showed his frustration for a fleeting second?

So I’m not entirely sure where I stand regarding Diane Arbus. While I have some concerns and doubts I still find myself fascinated by her work and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it will become clearer over time?

I will probably make a trip into the city to see the above exhibition though.

Lovely Depression era Kodachromes

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Female workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their break room, Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Source: FSA documentary color photos featured in New Deal Photography: USA 1935-1943 from Taschen.

When I think of the Great Depression I tend to think of photographs like “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange and the movie “The Grapes of Wrath“. Lange’s photographs, and most of those by her colleagues photographing for the Farm Security Administration were shot in black and white so I tend to think of the Great Depression in black and white as was The Grapes of Wrath. It came as quite a revelation to me to come across these spectacular Depression era photographs in color. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised through. The Great Depression didn’t end until the late 1930s and Kodachrome came out in 1935 so it was likely that someone would have been shooting in color during that period.

They also reminded me that Kodachrome really was quite a remarkable film. It’s too bad that it’s now no longer available and even if it were couldn’t be processed.

French Photography in the 19th Century

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Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène Durieu (French, 1800 – 1874) and Possibly with Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798 – 1863), Draped Model, about 1854, French, Albumen silver print, 18.6 × 13 cm (7 5/16 × 5 1/8 in.), 35.1 × 27 cm (13 13/16 × 10 5/8 in.), 85.XM.351.9, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Not much text in this post (other than the extremely detailed captions), but some interesting early photographs.

France is one of the pioneers of photographic technology and advances — progressing it as art and as science. The works of French photographers Édouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and Charles Nègre helped the development of paper photography.

Opening on August 30, here are some of the photographs set to highlight in the upcoming exhibition “Real/Ideal: Photography in France, 1847-1860” at the Getty Museum.

Source: French Photography in the 19th Century · Lomography

Edward Steichen. A Life in Photography

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J.P. Morgan photographed by Edward Steichen in 1903; photo known for the light reflected off the armrest being interpreted by viewers as a knife. Source: File:JP Morgan.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

This is another book I received as a birthday present. Unlike many of my of photography books this is less a book about Steichen than it is a book by Steichen. It’s full of interesting anecdotes and is lavishly illustrated with his photographs. The problem with such a book is that it’s hard to tell how objective it is. It’s clear from the book that he had a large ego. Does this get in the way of being honest about his work. I’m not sure how I feel about his pictures. While impressive, they somehow leave a me a little cold.

Pictorialist photographer; military documentary photographer; portrait photographer; fashion photographer; photography curator. Steichen is described in The Frustrating Genius of Edward Steichen by Frank Van Riper as follows:

In short, during his nearly 94-year life, Edward Steichen had not one but four, five, even six, separate careers. After the war for example, as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Steichen mounted what many have called the greatest photography exhibit of all time: the monumental “Family of Man” show, featuring 503 photographs from 273 photographers in 68 countries. (To be sure, the life-affirming show, mounted at the height of the cold war in 1955, was derided immediately by some critics as mawkish and superficial – and was savaged by some of Steichen’s younger photographic colleagues. It says something about the staying power of this exhibition, however, that its catalog not only remains in print, but also is a bestseller, after nearly a half century.)

I found myself wondering what would have happened if he’d had one overwhelming passion that he had devoted himself to. Would his pictures have had more emotional impact that they did spread over so many different areas? Of course we’ll never know.

Still – a great photographer and I thoroughly enjoyed the book.