Just around the time that I received a copy of “Untitled” (Aperture; $50), a collection of portraits of the mentally retarded which the photographer Diane Arbus took during the last few years of her life, my nephew was committed to the psychiatric ward of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where his condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. Two policemen had “apprehended” him—a six-foot-four, thin twenty-seven-year-old with tawny-yellow skin and braces—on Central Park West at Eighty-third Street, where he stood, shirtless, throwing stones at passing early-morning traffic.
In the gray-green gloom of his hospital room, I watched my nephew’s eyes alight on my face; he showed the same degree of interest in my presence that he did in the patterns the sun made on the floor and in the plaster crumbling from the ceiling. He did not speak. In that silence, I instinctively put physical distance between us, and I realized that I viewed his illness as a form of vampirism, ready to overtake and drain my rational self. At the same time, I was repelled by my predatory fascination with his condition, my desire to rub away at the pain blanketing his face so that I could uncover his illness and see what it was like. I found it difficult to distinguish between who he was and what I was supposed to be in his presence. Back at home, I found myself looking at Diane Arbus’s “Untitled” as a kind of road map—a road map into the land my nephew now inhabited, where his eyes rolled upward as he contemplated things I couldn’t see at all.
It took Diane Arbus approximately a decade to become Diane Arbus, the photographer whose signature subject matter was the freaks, lowlifes, and other fringe groups against which most people define themselves as “normal.” Prior to her emergence as one of the century’s preëminent photographers, Arbus had been, besides a wife and mother, a child of privilege; she had grown up in a status-conscious environment that contained nothing representative of her internal world. “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity,” Arbus once remarked. “I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality. And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.” It was her sense of a visually ordered universe—where everyone had ten fingers and toes, where bodies and faces were capable of expressing hope and love and failure in all the habitual ways—that Diane Arbus turned from in horror. She preferred the darkness that flooded the travelling carnivals, crumbling hallways, and hotel rooms where leftover lives creep along the edges of our consciousness. In Arbus’s visual narrative of disenfranchisement, one can see her saying, “That’s the way it is.” And what’s more—a startling declaration coming from a woman artist finding her way in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—“That’s the way it is, and I like it.”
The harsh light Arbus levelled at her subjects—“A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970,” “Loser at a Diaper Derby, N.J. 1967”—was an indication not of a merciless vision but of her desire to enhance her subjects’ presence, which she considered “terrific.” Like Warhol, Arbus used the dumbest language possible to describe her work. As though she were a child always on the verge of rebuilding the universe through found objects—or found images—no language but the most rudimentarily joyful could describe the moment when she happened upon the signposts leading toward her self-expression.
For Arbus, the categorically horrible resonated in ways that accidental public atrocities did not; she was not drawn to the gangland shootings, suicides, and disasters recorded by Weegee’s glib camera. She was not a journalist but a lyrical miniaturist, who saw in each sixteen-by-twenty print a kind of ecstasy made manifest. Arbus, an assimilated Jew, was always enthralled by attempts, however compromised, at transformation and redemption, and you can see her own belief in the near-religious profundity and ecclesiastical aura of her subjects in a picture like “Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967.” The title describes just that, but the image relies on the totemic weight of the bra and panties—the articles of clothing that the seated man needs to transform himself Arbus once described a series of portraits she took for Harper’s Bazaar as meditations on “what it is to become whoever we may be.” Documenting the paradox inherent in that statement was, in many respects, her lifework. And because the photographer committed suicide in 1971, her three posthumously published volumes of photographs are for many of us, quite literally, what Diane Arbus became.
Her second collection—”Diane Arbus: Magazine Work,” published in 1984—contains a broad assortment of believers: soothsayers, nudists, girls at fat camp, singles in love. It also includes Arbus’s 1964 essay about Bishop Ethel Predonzan of the Cathedral of the Creator, Omnipresence, Inc., in which the Bishop is repeatedly photographed in the act of self-creation. Each environment is a theatre of the Bishop’s own devising: in one image she is seen surrounded by a collection of tapestries of Jesus; in another, in her lace-bedecked bedroom, she seems to be blazing in the love light emitted by the Lord, or by Arbus’s flash. “I am the First Child of God. I am Firster than Jesus,” Arbus quotes the Bishop as saying, and her slightly skewed syntax is the linguistic equivalent of what Arbus’s audience finds disturbing in the photographer’s work—her fascination with the “off” detail that reveals the breadth of character. Most of Arbus’s photographs before the work seen in “Untitled” were shot in medium frame or closeup; the images are sharp and still. The tight framing and precision were necessary to contain the emotional charge of her subjects—all those souls she probably considered latter-day saints, but whom we would prefer to call sinners.
For many viewers, Arbus’s work still bears the taint of sin, as if her photographs were secrets that should have remained closeted but did not. Patricia Bosworth reported in her valuable biography “Diane Arbus” that when Arbus’s work was included in MOMA’s “Recent Acquisitions” show in 1965 the photo department’s librarian had to go each morning and wipe the spectators’ spit from the images. Arbus’s audience was telling her that they did not appreciate her casting the first stone—or, more to the point, that they did not appreciate being reminded of the people we cast stones at every day. Unlike Walker Evans, whom Arbus admired, she did not make suffering noble. And unlike many photographers—Weston, Levitt, Mapplethorpe—she did not imbue her photographs with a distinctly personal lyricism; hers was the lyricism inherent in her uneasy collaboration with her subjects.
Part of the continued resentment levelled at Arbus has to do with her power to make us take illicit pleasure in her preoccupations. At the same time, her genius for recognizing and exposing the strangeness in the ordinary threatens to make subjects of us all. Like the great Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, Arbus existed sufficiently outside her own belief to report on the belief, even the fanaticism, of others. One always had the sense that the images O’Connor and Arbus used to pierce our consciousness could be used by the artists to describe themselves. Ultimately, they seemed to be saying, “If I can say this about myself: imagine what I’m really saying about you.”
Both critics and supporters of Arbus have been quick to point out that her world could not have been created in any time other than her own—the freak-laden sixties. But to relegate Arbus to a period is to sentimentalize her significance and to make her into a martyr of her times—a single mother fucking and photographing for freedom. True art is distinguishable from the junk of its epoch by the singularity of its vision. The extraordinary power of “Untitled” confirms our earliest impression of Arbus’s work; namely, that it is as iconographic as it gets in any medium.
The photographs collected in “Untitled” were taken at residences for the mentally retarded, between 1969 and 1971. Many of the pictures appear to have been taken on Halloween, or during pageants, for Arbus’s subjects are frequently in various stages of masquerade: draped in sheets or waving wands or hiding under paper-bag masks. Perhaps most striking for people familiar with Arbus’s earlier work will be the wide-open spaces in this album; all but a handful of these images were taken outside. In one, a motley parade of women in improbable headgear fills the frame; in another, a young woman gleefully rolls in clover near a swing set. Once you’ve gotten past the physiognomies of Arbus’s subjects—their flat, mongoloid faces, their disconcerting stares—the photographs open up other possibilities. Arbus began her career as a stylist and a fashion photographer, working in collaboration with her husband, Allan. (They were divorced in 1969.) These pictures show her sensitivity to the expressive power of clothing; they are, among other things, extraordinary fashion photographs, bordering on the surreal. Photographers such as Darryl Turner and Judy Linn show garments for what they are by making the world around the clothes as strange and unfamiliar as possible; Arbus contrasts the idea of the subjects’ literal—and often clumsy—covering up with the openness of their expressions. One of my favorite images in the book is of a woman whose mouth is downcast and who is wearing a dress and a cardigan and ankle socks with Mary Janes. Her lips are smudged with food, and sunlight bounces off her forehead. She holds an empty plastic-foam cup, which is turned down, toward the green grass (seen in black-and-white); the turned-down cup echoes her turned-down mouth. Pressed under her left arm is a box on which we can read the words “Child Life Shoes.” She is, like many of Arbus’s models, a grotesque; the profound difference here is that Arbus’s subject isn’t presenting herself as beautiful or not beautiful. She just is.
The singularity of Arbus’s vision is the over-all theme of “Untitled,” if “theme” is the word. These photographs of the mentally retarded can’t be confined by critical categorization, because they are purely ecstatic; they are the pictures Arbus had been waiting all her life to take. It’s as if the most remarkable images she produced in the early sixties—the boy and girl on Hudson Street who resemble a hardened baby-faced gangster and his moll, or the Christmas tree in Levittown shimmering with despair—were faint talismans leading Arbus to this final study, in which her justly renowned control cannot compete with the unconscious power of her subjects. Arbus separated herself from her past work—and her need to cajole and flatter her subjects until they revealed something of their “true” selves—by photographing people whose power stemmed from the fact that they were unaware of their vulnerability; they literally didn’t have the wit to be guarded in the first place. Here, the inner and the outer coexist in a nearly perfect symmetry; all that Diane Arbus had to do was watch and wait and be brave enough to click the shutter.
These photographs don’t feel exploitative in the least, because they are filled with love and discipline—Arbus’s love of the subjects, and the emotional discipline she had to have in order to distance herself from their grinning, lipstick- or jam-smeared faces enough to approach them as subjects. In fact, this is the warmest collection of Arbus’s work to date, in part because of the intimacy that exists among the subjects themselves. Again and again we see the inmates holding hands, or their faces suffused with joy in the company of particular friends. But several of these photographs also express great love for and trust in their photographer: not because they were particularly interested in being memorialized by the notorious Diane Arbus but because—for that moment—she was paying attention. The late religious philosopher Simone Weil once said that attention was a form of prayer and was thus a means of loving God, and you can’t help wondering: Was their willingness to be seen a form of absolute communion that was ultimately disconcerting to their photographer? An artistic breakthrough of this magnitude doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness for the artist, but it almost always results in work that has cataclysmic significance for the audience.
“Untitled” is not a “Family of Man” examination of emotions made banal by their putative universality. Arbus is after something altogether different. Once, when she was describing her sense of alienation as a child, she said, “It was as if I didn’t inherit my own kingdom for a long time.” “Untitled” reveals a strange yet unthreatening landscape, at once expansive and unusually decorous. In that mythical landscape, Arbus’s subjects are free of institutions and uncomplicated in their need for affection, only wearing masks because they feel like it. ♦
