“The Mysterious in the Photographs of Diane Arbus” January 4, 2004
The Mysterious in the Photographs of Diane Arbus
This is my answer to a friend’s question about what I thought the “mysterious” was in Diane Arbus’s photographs, referred to in that day’s “New York Times” review.
First of all, I haven’t seen the exhibit, and probably only 40-50 Arbus photographs in my life, and most of them about 30 years ago when I was much more involved in photography than I am now. Also, I haven’t seen the catalog or even the photographs being described, so I know less than nothing about what’s actually being described.
I carry in my head only the famous photographs of hers (the giant, the twins, the boy with the hand grenade, the dwarf, the housewives) and they exist outside of time and context for me—but they seem contemporaneous in a way that a Walker Evans or an Ansel Adams photograph does not. And I use those two examples for a specific reason—first of all because one of them took portraits and the other landscapes, and because both of them ATTEMPTED to portray reality (and I think they probably even thought they had) and because any sense of reality has slipped away from their images, they no longer seem “true” or even possible.
What I think Arbus was doing (in retrospect) was to create an IMPENETRABLE photograph—you couldn’t get sucked into it or even “understand” the images in the usual ways—feel empathy or appreciation or whatever—and they don’t seem to exist in the same sense of “time” as a Walker Evans or an Ansel Adams photograph does. There is an element of threat somehow, but to say that they are of “freaks” (which was how they were written about when I was reading about photography in the seventies) was something that didn’t satisfy me then and even less so today.
What the reviewer was talking about (that the first girl understood that Arbus wasn’t looking for a flatteringly “false” portrait, and that the second girl understood she was looking for something more mysterious) makes me think of my recent studies of Rembrandt. It’ll probably be obvious in the exhibit at the MoFA, but Rembrandt got into trouble only when he refused to idealize (and make false) the human form. He began to be repulsed by the manufactured, desperately false expectations of his patrons, in their fashions, their manners, and their behavior, which was seldom noble unless it suited them—they had all the power after all. If things were going badly, the artist was always the last one to be paid.
But following Rembrandt’s first bankruptcy, he moved in among those who had no thought of patrons, and were more honest and straightforward—those lost to decay, the non-beautiful, those without “airs and graces.” These no-hopers retained, for him, a sense of honor and nobility absent from those born or married into better circumstances.
Rembrandt did a remarkable etching of a naked woman with a pot belly sitting in a chair that comes to mind, and it is so particular that it still exists in my mind in a way that no one else’s portraits of that time—and I saw hundreds in Amsterdam and Haarlem—still does.
But in Rembrandt’s time, these portraits were reviewed (and I read plenty of those reviews in Schama’s book) the same way Arbus’s portraits have been (the urban legend is that when Arbus’s photographs were first exhibited, patrons literally SPAT on them)—that they were taunting and/or making fun of their subjects, or that they were purposefully and deliberately perverse. That the artist was “disturbed.”
What’s interesting to me now is that when I look into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait, they continue to stare back at me. The same with Arbus’s subjects—you don’t look AT them the same way you do an Avedon photograph, but they dispassionately stare back at you.
When Rembrandt was painting portraits, the custom of the time was to work with symbols—the trustworthy gloves, the woman looking slightly upwards to her husband, the faithful dog, the tools of the subject’s profession, etc. In addition, even if a subject was seventy and infirm, they were usually painted as if in the prime of life, or their infirmity was “disguised” somehow—they demanded portraits of how they WANTED to be seen. And as a result it’s amazing how lifeless they are—and will remain.
What Rembrandt and Arbus saw, however, was that in the broken down, in the no longer trying, in the outsider, there was a bedrock reality of “I am” that proudly stood in relationship to the observer, that refused to play to the camera. There’s no looking into those photographs but only a looking out—and that’s what makes them uncomfortable to look at. It may also be true that Arbus saw these “freaks” as self-portraits or representations of the alienation she herself felt, but that explanation is no longer enough for me when I try to describe them as ART.
Or sometimes I think what Arbus was drawn to was the sensation of being overpowered by her subject, of staring into the horrific and the overwhelming sensation of being terrified—the way that when I accidentally cut my wrist there were women who wanted to stare deeply into the wound—that fascination with what scares us most.
Perhaps what the reviewer is getting at as “mysterious” is the lack of command over the subject, of the breakdown between the “control” of the photographer and that which is being photographed (“captured,” as they say). But then again, he suggests that wasn’t really the case for Arbus (as evidenced particularly by her obvious restraint when choosing which shots to develop from her contact sheets), so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I don’t really know what he means at all.
I think you’re actually looking for something different through the aleatoric nature of your work. I really do think that Arbus was still dealing within the framework of the portrait, as Rembrandt did. In addition, I think she chose particular images BECAUSE of their disturbing nature and, even if that disturbance exists only subconsciously, it is no less real or appreciable by the photographer than the viewer. There’s nothing aleatoric or “flat” or unmediated in her photographs—in fact, they’re the exact opposite of chance-generated art—they are deliberately framed and contained, at least, if not controlled.
But I think that Rembrandt’s paintings are actually closer to your process—there are paintings where he’s attempting to capture movement and the hands are blurred, there are sections of many of the paintings that are as expressionist as anything Lucien Freud ever painted, and there are numerous examples late in his career where the paint is applied so thick (impasto?) that it actually becomes sculpture. And there is one amazing portrait (known as “The Jewish Wedding”) where the man’s sleeve is three-dimensional and there is something (no one knows what—eggshells?) piled under the golden paint so that a three-dimensional surface is created that captures and flashes reflected light that shimmers and twinkles as you walk towards it. And there is one Rembrandt portrait in the Rijksmuseum where the woman’s necklace is actually three-dimensional, as if he wants to trick you into reaching out so that you can hold it in your hand.
So I guess Rembrandt is not after what you’re after either—he’s trying to create a separate reality VIA the painting that breathes and lives as life does around us in the gallery.
But the place where you two meet (and maybe Arbus as well) is that they were discontent with anything calling itself art that is flat and two-dimensional—or even (in the case of sculpture) three-dimensional. They wanted to create something that lived in the fourth dimension of time as we and EVERYTHING ELSE exists if it exists at all. And that was the essential nature of their art, trying to capture the quality of aliveness beyond the object itself—to become not so much a portrait as a mirror for the viewer, one that would open the viewer’s eyes—not one that would console the viewer that their eyes are already open.
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