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Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition

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This collection of 81 black and white photographs by Diane Arbus was edited and designed by her daughter, Doon and friend Marvin Israel and published in 1972 after her suicide the previous year. The photographs are preceeded by text of tape recordings of classes that the photographer gave the year she died, as well as excerpts from interviews and some of her own writings on photography. The text illuminates Arbus' concerns about her art and her subjects. Although she did do studies of objects, such as Disneyland, a hotel lobby, and a Xmas tree, Arbus was more interested in people, in particular the kind of people she had never seen before. Coming from a wealthy Park Avenue background, existing in an unreal environment, cocooned from adversity, Arbus felt her immunity painful, which explains her attraction to marginalised groups. One can compare Arbus' studies to those of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe moved from harsh presentations of marginalised gay men's sexuality to soft focus celebrity portraiture. Arbus moved in the opposite direction, from glamour fashion photography with her then husband Alan, to her reality marginalised portraiture. Arbus' experience with fashion provides her composition and while her camera can scrutinise, her photos never patronise. Perhaps this is due to the complicitity apparent from the subjects. These people want to be photographed, and Arbus presents them with dignity. But what makes them compelling is the what Arbus described as the gap between intention and effect, what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. Sometimes, often the thing we see is sadness, but we can't laugh at these people because they are so unguarded. Arbus' photos aren't posed. She tells us how she arranged her view rather than arranging her subject, so that they are planned observations. The photographs here taken between 1962 and 1970 cover the range of her interest in marginalised subjects including the freaks she classified as "aristocrats" who were born with their trauma so had passed their test in life, and made her feel a mix of shame and awe. Midgets, dwarfs, nudists, transvestites, identical twins and triplets, a giant with his parents, musclemen, carnival performers, a woman with her baby monkey, and the untitled retards. This is the world Arbus entered into. It's hard not to consider her suicide as being related to the subjects of her work. Arbus was interested in exposing the flaw, and her camera gave her licence to privacy, however the cold scrutiny of her camera may have been too much when it was focused upon herself. The self portraits I have seen show her looking uncomfortable, the photographer clearly lacking the skills she would apply to her own subjects. There is a rumour that Arbus set up a camera to photograph her own death, mentioned in the Patricia Bosworth biography, though no evidence was found when her body was discovered. Like the great ones, Arbus received acclaim posthumously, and this book is an ode to her genius.

A friend working in bookstore asked why I'd never mentioned being in Diane Arbus' "book of freaks". Until that moment I didn't know but of course I knew she'd photographed me. (There's a hint!) It was without a doubt one of the most intense experiences of my life. That she often saw what others could not is reflected on every page. She called her subjects aristocrats. I think you must be one to see that quality in another. The photographs taken thirty years ago are timeless.Although the clothing, hairstyles and makeup are from a definite era (sixties) one can hardly imagine the subjects dressed any other way. Arbus has created a nation of anachronisms in her book. There is a definite sense of family, of community from page to page; from a Brooklyn bedroom to a Greenwich Village park bench to a lawn party at Willowbrook. Someone asked me how it felt to be in this "book of freaks". I couldn't answer then. But now I can: Even if your face is not on the pages of Monograph you will find yourself there. Just look.

Quite literally, this book made me want to be a photographer.

I remember seeing this book at my aunt and uncle's house when I was quite young (maybe 5 or 6). Flipping its pages as an adult is quite an experience, but as a child I was equal parts totally enthralled, disturbed, confused and yet completely smitten. I remember becoming quite familiar with the book's many characters, and always looked at this book when I visited their house.

When I started experimenting in photography in my mid-teens, I became re-aquainted with it from visiting bookstores and libraries, and through art history courses.

Her images I think speak more about who she is than who her subjects are, but in a way that is brutally revealing. On the surface, these photographs represent a cross-section of fringe society, with all of its inherant complexity and grit. Cross dressers, midgets, nudists, drug addicts, "dancers" and the like. But they become quite revealing about her psyche during the period she was creating this amazing body of work.
She approaches each subject not at a distance, but with the sensitivity and affection of someone who really cares and is invested in these relationships. She lived with a few of these people, hung out with many others...it was the kind of company she prefered, even after being raised in a very wealthy Jewish family who owned a department store.
The images are confrontational, sensational, unnerving, and a little disturbing. And some have really become icons of modern photography (the boy holding the grenade, the triplets on their bed, and many more).

But what really affected me the most was the exerps collected posthumously in the beginning of the book, in which Arbus describes her method and some of the mantras of her craft. There are so many powerful statements in this preface, all of which further support the understanding of her importance in the medium. Two of her most powerful statements:

"You don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. I have never taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse."

"I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them."

These statements really speak volumes about the responsibilty of an artist, and how everybody has a different slant about what's in front of them. Her words occasionally provide fuel for me to take initiative in my own work and take more risks and less excuses.

Definately of of the finest groups of photographs in modern art history. Hugely influential and succesful, and totally unequalled in its genre (except maybe by Nan Goldin).

As Diane Aubus said, 'Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that recognize.' She liked to visit unknown places, taking photos for unknown people (transvestite, nudist campers, Jewish giant, twins, etc). Reading through this collection of portraits, it would be a discovery-like journeys. Her braveness to approach the subjects. and into their places, and then into their souls. Those people are sometimes not 'beautiful', but you can see the inner world of those people under their faces. The untitled series at the end of book taken with some retarded people, I found that is certainly striking. Finally she committed suicide in 1971, just like leaving an unresolved story ending in her works.

If you are into B/W photos, it is a must buy.

Diane Arbus is my favorite photographer and this book displays why. Her photographs show life as it is, with diversity around every corner. The images are earie as the subjects seem to be standing right in front of you. That is credited to her technique of using a flash even in the daylight. I reccomend the 25th anniversary edition because of the better quality in the prints. Every photographer or art enthusiast needs this book in their collection!

It is not overstating the case to say that creating these photographs cost Diane Arbus her life, her suicide followed soon after they were assembled. When you study them, (and you study them, you don't look at them), you quickly understand why. Arbus was a brittle and emotionally volatile woman long before taking these haunting images, the product of a privileged upbringing who cut her teeth in the world of fashion photography, making perfect-looking people look even more perfect. Having refined her technical skills she ventured into the opposite side of that world, seeking out the people society hid and desperately tried to forget.

Arbus said famously that most of us live in fear of a traumatic disaster while her subjects had already endured theirs and were, in a sense, aristocrats as a consequence - free from the fear of being unwanted - secure in the knowledge that they most certainly were unwanted. Arbus was so obsessed with presenting unadulterated reality that she never cropped her photos, indeed, the "live area" of the prints goes beyond the photo and includes some of the film's border - to prove the picture wasn't cropped. She dove into the dark side like an obsessive child at a circus freak show, nothing was disturbing enough to satisfy her and even the commonplace became bizarre by the time she was done with it.

Arbus was passionate about photographing the mentally retarded, but giants, transsexuals, twins, triplets, skinheads, nudists and other bits of social flotsam and jetsam lured her as well. Whether it was a boy holding hand grenades or a teenage couple looking like creepy miniaturized adults, Diane Arbus gravitated for the slice of humanity certain to engender revulsion. Her genius lay in the ability to bring nothing to the proceedings, she approached her subjects on their own terms. Because she did this, the subjects did not "rise" to meet the camera, they remained fixed in their personal nightmares. This made for profound, well-crafted photographs. Arbus didn't see beauty or pathos in her subjects, simply their reality. She invited us to behold what we dread and honor the dignity of her subjects. We are able to do that because we are more or less healthy, and because we can close the book when it becomes too painful; she could not.

Every Arbus photograph is a self-portrait; every lost, hideous freak was Diane Arbus looking in the mirror. For the most part it seems that the people in her pictures survived her completely unsentimental scrutiny, she did not. What's more unsettling is that the popularity of these pictures gave rise to a wave of young copycat photographers who thought it was "cool" to photograph the disadvantaged, disabled, and mentally ill. The copycats never understood that for it to be art you have to care, you have to get involved. Arbus got too involved.

I first came across "An Aperture Monograph" by accident, many years ago. The images were astonishing, and when I later read Susan Sontag's famous essay, I immediately recognized the photographer she was referring to. Arbus' images are unforgettable, and do not diminish in power with time. Wisely, those in control of her estate have not released any of these works as posters, t-shirts, or other consumer items -- you have to buy the book or attend an exhibit if you want to see them. It's possible that the artist's sensibility is so powerful that even with repeated viewing, the photographs would retain their power to surprise.

The exhibit "A Family Album" (currently at the Portland Museum of Art) contains several of Arbus' proof sheets. They demonstrate that Arbus (like many photographers) took many shots of the same subject, in similar poses, before choosing the one image that expressed what she wished to convey. What she was searching for was not so much a dwarf, a transvestite, twins, or any other subject, but her own artistic vision. Sometimes these are unhappy people in opulent surroundings, or people we might think should be miserable and hopeless, conveying a strange sense of command.

It would be a trite observation to say that each of these photographs implies a "story" behind the subject. Any photograph can do that. We are, of course, curious about them. Why do so many of the couples seem distant from each other? What is the older man doing with the boy on the park bench? Others are deliberately suggestive: the nude couple in the forest clearly evokes Adam and Eve; the flower girl at a wedding, a fairy princess emerging from the mist. What saves them from appearing posed or artificial (which they certainly were) is Arbus' ability to give the simultaneous impression that these were candid snapshots. This multi-level presence is the mark of a true artist, in total control of her medium.

The book concludes with several untitled photographs taken at a home for the developmentally disabled. The first of these shows two elderly women, the first couple in the book who seemed truly present with each other, and happy. The final photograph, of a masked woman leading a group through a field, suggests nothing less than the progress of civilization itself.

Arbus' work forces the viewer to look at the world and themselves more deeply. The most apt description is from Rilke's poem, Torso of an Archaic Apollo:

"...nor would this star have shaken the shackles off,
bursting with light, until there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life."

My paperback copy of this book purchased back in the early/mid 1970's is frayed, folded and soiled from years of regular viewing. Yet every time I look at it, I continue to be amazed at these images. This is a classic book, ranking with Frank's "The Americans", Cartier-Bresson's "The Decisive Moment" and Eggleston's "William Eggleston's Guide". Before Arbus, there was no one. After Arbus, well...maybe there still is no one. This book opened the eyes of a whole future generation of photographers. The subject matter has now been over-exposed (pun intended). But, after all the pictures and all the picture makers who followed, no one presented the subject of people living off-center better than Arbus.

When we see flaws in others, why is it so hard to look away? Does it make us feel somehow better about ourselves? Maybe that is the case for some, but not Diane Arbus. What her photography attempts to convey is that beauty can be found, even in the most unexpected of places. Although, her ideal of beauty isn't the kind that compels people to go to a plastic surgeon to make themselves "pretty", or more pleasing to the eyes of other, it is nonetheless valid because it goes much deeper than the hollow image that beauty has become in contemporary society to many. Indeed, just one look at her work will illustrate that as she simply prefers the common people who are found everywhere from suburban lawns to skid rows, strip clubs to asylums, dance halls to darkened rooms. Perhaps, most important to her vision is that these people have flaws, just as everyone does and it is precisely these "flaws" that attracted Arbus' to the subjects portrayed in this collection.
Although many of her subjects inhabit places that many of us would rather avoid, often coming to us in nightmares from which we struggle to awaken, by the snapping of the shutter somehow they are made real to us, safe, unassuming and even fragile. Looking, for instance, at a photograph entitled "Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th st, NYC" my initial thoughts are flooded by a kind of morbid curiosity, but then as I continue to gaze and I notice their, eyes and faces, their expressions, and their willingness to share their lives with us; yes we, the same people who so often greets them with cold stares and cruel words. Diane Arbus was able to see the beauty in that kind of courage, a kind that would make many of us shudder, and her photos reveals to us the brilliance of it. Like a flower sprouting from the mire and destruction of a battlefield, Arbus' photography hits us hard, but leaves no bruises. Hers are images that when viewing for only a moment, we will remember for years.
Through her depictions of dwarfs, giants, drag queens, nudists, crying children, transvestites, lonely women, weathered faces and mental patients, we are reminded that beauty can often be found where it is least expected. But this is not the beauty of celebrity or fame, perfection or contriviality, but that found in their shadows, in the dark and hidden places that exist everywhere and at all times. Through her daring and revolutionary work Arbus struggled to teach us how to see this often tortured beauty, and I think above all else her work accomplishes that, but only if we open our eyes and our minds and let that beauty in.

Diane Arbus depicts the "off beaten path" part of society in the most glamorous way possible. She makes the socially unaccepted look completely relaxed and comfortable in front of the camera. I am very lucky to have stumbled upon this book of photographs by Diane Arbus - make yourself lucky also.