Do you think that's good photography?
Do you think that's good photography?
Arbus at Arles. Also: one year of Interloper!
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In the syrupy heat of Arles at the beginning of July, a queue was forming early every morning. Friends were strategising, advising one another to go first thing, or straight after lunch, or at the end of the day, conferring as to when they wouldn’t have to stand for an hour or more to wait for entry to the ground floor gallery at Luma.
You chose a strategy, and had to stand in the queue anyway, fanning yourself. When finally you walked into the room, you were met with a vast steel web, seeming to extend endlessly. The atmosphere was hushed, thinned by air conditioning, and you saw a kind of tangle, framed images caught in the web like flies. Blacks, whites, greys. Photographs were hung on tall metal structures, some a few inches from the ground, some that you had to crane your neck to see. The exhibition text invited a “labyrinthine journey”, its irregularly-sized and -angled structures offering no obvious route. When you made your way deep enough in, approaching what felt like the centre, you’d suddenly catch sight of something familiar: yourself. A floor-to-ceiling mirror had doubled the room, making it seem twice as vast. This moment was a relief.
The exhibition, Constellation, consisted of 454 photographs by Diane Arbus. The collection, acquired by Luma in 2011, is the complete set of proofs printed by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorised to make prints of Arbus’s work after her death. There was no exhibition catalogue; the Arbus estate keeps a famously tight rein on the distribution of her images. Attendants quietly circling the gallery were quick to whisperingly admonish you for taking any photographs, so my phone stayed in my bag, and I wrote my notes on the back of the programme.
The varied heights of the images required the viewer to crouch if they wanted a close look at the lower ones, or to lean back and push onto tiptoes to try and reconcile the ones hung high (many were too high to inspect closely — and the frustration of this made up part of the emotional landscape of the show). There were mirrors on the back of many of the frames, so that when you moved to the other side of a particular grid, you’d suddenly be confronted by a haunted face and little black eyes, your own, stricken by the work, and made crude by the reflective surface. A common defence of Arbus is that she holds up a mirror to the viewer, exposing their own judgements, rather than making judgements herself; the presence of mirrors in the show, the way they were used to trick and surprise you, was a reminder of this.
Overall, the exhibition was designed in such a way as to remind you not only of yourself, but also of your body. It’s rare to be in a show which requires you to move so dynamically, crouching and reaching, turning so many corners, doubling back on yourself intentionally and unintentionally. I felt like Arbus might have done as she photographed: adventuring, exploring, but also having to work for what I saw — not drifting through a white cube as a floating consciousness, but a breathing thing, reliant on muscles and bone; a thing growing tired, ageing.
Back in the heat, in the Place du Forum or wherever, I didn’t care what else I saw. I felt completely filled up by Arbus, completely sated, and was clinging tight to the impressions I’d gathered, already fading and becoming strange without phone snaps to remind me what I’d seen. I was surprised to find that some people hated the show. She’d hate all her work up there like that, she was so careful about her edits, reluctant about their dissemination. It’s true, she was reticent when alive, turning down certain opportunities for exhibition and publication. But true, too, that she was an immensely ambitious photographer — this ambition perhaps a defining characteristic. Wouldn’t she have loved being the talk of a festival, such an expanse of her work so lauded?
Perhaps this kind of speculation opens up the question of what exactly we owe to an artist after their death — to whom does the work now belong, the artist or the audience? And what might Arbus have made of that particular discussion? Would she have respected the propriety of death, or would she have wanted to see the notebooks and the contact sheets, the full scope of the work, even chosen by executors rather than the artist themselves? (I think of her photographs made at morgues, of autopsies, of bodies labelled by a tag on the toe.)
The elegance of the curatorial strategy of Constellation was its so well matching the form of the show to its content — to Arbus’s photographic mind. The sense of overwhelm, of chaos and sprawl, feel just like the sense transmitted by Arbus’s oeuvre as a whole. I’ve never been in an exhibition which enveloped me so successfully, the physical experience of being there matching the aesthetic experience of the images themselves; not only reproducing Arbus’s tireless search for pictures, but also her pictures’ point of view.
A photographer’s vision isn’t a copy of the world, but a compaction of a feeling about it. Arbus’s world was off-kilter, uncanny; a world of extremes, disorientating. Constellation reproduced this world, containing me in it. I felt all this in the gallery, trying to make sure I’d seen all the pictures, trying to maintain my waning focus through the hours I spent there. A frantic feeling that I might not be able to see it all — not only because of the show’s scale, but because of the purposive disorganisation — that I might miss something. The shock of first coming into the enormous and endless-seeming room, doubled by the mirror. The austere angles of the black metal structures. The monochrome. The thin air.
Beauty is a joke, I thought, as I looked at the photographs. Beauty is seedy, a moth-eaten rug, a threadbare consolation for all of life’s darkness. It feeds on itself, the primping and polish only showing the darkness up more strongly. This is beauty as Arbus sees it: the teenage beauty queen with the coat of dark hair from shoulder to wrist; the children with old people’s faces; the looming wax figures of celebrities and politicians; Mae West baring her teeth in her terrible, shiny bedroom.
Arbus said: “Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe… Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.”
In her hands, the desire to be beautiful or glamorous reads as pathetic, a desperate scrambling for something, a sham. What you can’t help people knowing about you. This assessment is visible not only in her pictures of people, but also in her landscapes: the house on a hill which is just a facade, the scaffolding propping it up visible behind, looking imposing and trivial at the same time; the fake Disneyland rocks on wheeled pallets. So much of what looks impressive at first glance, in an Arbus picture, is a simulacrum: the image of something, not the thing itself. For much of her career, she photographed people inside their homes, in their living rooms. Their furniture, pictures, and personal effects are as much a part of the portrait as the person themselves. We all try to bolster ourselves with images, with trinkets, putting frames around pictures as ballast against life, hoping our clothes or living spaces will reflect the kinds of people we try to become. Arbus isn’t fooled. She sees what we’re trying to do. The images remain inert. What’s apparent, instead, is our striving.
If she is cruel, as is often said, then this is the way she is cruel: on the subject of beauty, luxury, and fortune; on the impossibility of trying to beautify life, to sanitise it; on the failure of trying to seem different than we are. Arbus was the child of wealthy parents, the owners of a Manhattan department store. She grew up in The Great Depression, though it didn’t touch her. “I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality,” she said. Her vision of the rich is so biting because her earliest experience was of privilege holding reality at arm’s length. Her pictures exposed the hypocrisy and hubris of such a position. In her search for what she came to term “the forbidden” — the circuses, the eccentrics, the freak shows — she was looking for what was hidden from her as a child. If the showy world of riches was all phoney, then this forbidden world seemed, by contrast, authentic and real. This was the backstage, the place where performance dropped, where there was real intimacy, real truth.
In the last two years of her life, she was working on a new series in Vineland, New Jersey, in and around a residential school for the developmentally disabled. For the first time, her subjects move through wide open space, leading one another by the hand in their nightgowns and fancy dress. In these pictures, Arbus is warm. Her ruthless eye for domestic detail has relaxed. In the outdoor landscape, her subjects are her pictures’ centre. They are photographed playing together, convivial, wearing Halloween masks. Despite their costumes, it seems as though Arbus had found subjects who weren’t trying to convince her of anything, or trying to pretend beauty and glamour. Their playfulness is an authentic one. It feels as though Arbus saw this as the only way to be free: to drop the pretence and the polish, the need to be perceived a certain way, the need to be perceived at all.
Arbus wasn’t free from this need, of course. She wanted to be perceived. When her images were on the wall at MoMA for the first time, as part of John Szarkowski’s New Documents show, she’d go and loiter at her display, listening to the conversations people had about her work, and writing them down. Here we find a kind of self-portrait: her witnessing of being witnessed, writing it down unsparingly, just as she might have photographed it.
From her notebook, January 1967:
Man: They’re nothing.
Woman: What?
Man: Nothing. I could go out and do the same thing.
Woman: Well why don’t you?
Man: You don’t think I could?
Woman: I believe you. I just want to see you do it.
Man: Do you think that’s good photography?
Diane Arbus: Constellation is open at LUMA Arles until 31st December 2023.
One year of Interloper!
Last summer, when I was thinking about finally starting this newsletter, months after resolving to do so, I felt nervous; I didn’t want to write a few posts and let it trail off. I’m so proud that I’ve written here consistently, kept to my deadline every month.
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Do you think that's good photography?
I loved reading about your experience of witnessing the exhibition. I wish I could have seen it in person, but from your account, I feel like I was there. Admittedly, I need to look at more Arbus. I've always been mesmerized by her work, the bit I've seen.
As an art dealer I sold Albno Sword Swallower and I am sorry I didn't buy it for myself at it's aristry remains imy favorite Arbus. It is composed in such a painterly way that it radiates beauty. The flowing tent and her hair as well as the image are memorable