Customer Reviews

Diane Arbus: Untitled

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Exhibiting her pictures taken at homes for the mentally handicapped, this book made me feel both sorrow for the situations these people lived in, as well as the innate beauty of someone who doesn't judge and lives their life being joyous. Alternately smiling and furrowing my brow, I have looked through this book numerous times. These people don't pose for their photographs, they simply exist and Diane Arbus has captured their existence with an amazing beauty and personal touch.

Diane Arbus was to photography what Andrew Wyeth was to painting, or what Carson McCullers was to literature. Arbus's work was startingly beautiful--not in the conventional sense, but in the sense that the bare emotions conveyed by her subjects was simply beautiful in its humanity. Arbus photographed people that other photographers of the time weren't interested in capturing on their lenses--she was best at photographing those who lived on the outside of mainstream society, and her work was not only of immense honesty but also provided something of a character study for every person she photographed. This collection is composed of photographs she shot of mentally handicapped or disturbed individuals, shortly before her death. It is an unflinching, honest look at people who are largely either pitied or mocked by society.

A sad book, a mind-opening book, and many more things. Viewing these photographs will conjure up completely different personal reactions, depending upon your frame of mind at the time of viewing. That is what is so remarkable about Arbus' work; so many emotions are brought to the surface.

And while I know that some people will be turned off, even repulsed by this final phase of Arbus' work, I strongly disagree with the reviewer from Chico, CA in saying that it would have been better if this work has not been published. This work is not pretty, and it is not candy-coated, but it should be, and thankfully has been, published. Real life is not always pretty, and we each have our own concepts of such ideals. If you are uncomfortable with other's perspectives on beauty and reality, close the book or sell it to someone else. But do not impose your censorship on me.

... and I strongly suggest you take the time to go see the penultimate exhibition of Arbus' work that is currently at the San Francisco MOMA and is set to start touring soon.

Arbus' "untitled" work is very similar to her work with couples... it gives power to the powerless, disarms the authoritative. Look at her images of couples in the 50s and 60s... the Men (those in a power position of a relationship) are disconnected, almost bored by the process, while the Women hold your gaze defiantly, challenging the viewer.... menacing. Not to be sexually stereotyped, the images of Mothers and Sons.... the dominant Mothers becoming the dispassionate party while the Son engages you. So too are these untitled images of the "mentally challenged", the handicapped, the children and young adults with Down's Syndrome in the images. They are living in an era where they are shunned and exiled to mental institutions.... but these images show us that they are not the weak and powerless who should be pitied.

In Arbus' earlier images, the power-base in the relationship of people shown set up the dichotomy. In these images, the defiant gazes come from those WE, the *viewer* choose to ignore and treat with indifference.

This book demonstrates the immense talent Diane Arbus had in capturing people's environment, emotions, and presenting their story. Being an Arbus fan, I felt that the individuals in this book were in many ways the happiest people she had ever photographed.

The quality of the photos in the book are beautiful and pretty much true to form of an actual work from her. I highly recommend this book!

All the reviews I've seen of this great work strike one like rhetoric from a Stalinesque apparitchnik circa 1938, wherein the work in incomprehensible unless serviceable to the party, which believes in the goodness of life and the uplift of the handicapped. That this work may not wish to function remotely like this or that its subjects may be incidental to its purposes is apparently unthinkable. All in all, rather mind-boggling, a commentary in an alternate universe where most everyone has never had a sublime experience with art and yet still inexplicably has great interest in it. Parade of Masked and Grotesque Retards, indeed.

Many of the photos are meant to be...gasp?...Unpleasant and Unnerving sometimes through using Handicapped Persons. It also appears Arbus has dressed and positioned many of them, if I'm not mistaken which is...hushed silence?...Vaguely Mean If You Think About It, Sort Of. I'm sure this was a major ethical, nagging concern before she killed herself a couple months later. Don't you get...SHE HATED LIFE! She thought the human race was a grotesque infestation.

In conclusion, isn't there some church you should be salivating at rather than polluting the discourse of art with insipid Calvinist twaddle? This is an awe-inspiring, shocking, terrifying and transcendent work of triumphant nihilism that shows no mercy to the prim, Sunday schoolmarm twaddle you're pushing.

I bought this book after seeing the Nicole Kidman movie that was made about her life. The movie was so weird I had to see what her photos looked like. They are also weird...

That Diane Arbus is a serious and important artist, there is no doubt. But even the greatest of artists can be wrong.

This is not a book that most people would wish to have on their coffee table, or anywhere in their homes. The images are grotesque, disturbing, cruel, ugly.

These images were made when Arbus's life was spiraling down, when she was more and more lost in her final depression. They provide an insight into her mind that it would have been better not to publish.