Diane Arbus: Photographing the Misfits
Many of her contemporaries saw Arbus only as a photographer of monsters, uninterested, detached, and without compassion. For Diane Arbus, being born into a wealthy family (her family owned a building overlooking Central Park and a store where the richest New Yorkers shopped for fashion) and growing up without any adversity would always be reasons for judgment and guilt.
But Arbus's photography actually aimed to normalize people living on the margins of society. The artist saw nothing repulsive or wrong in these "monsters," Freaks, as they were called, but rather found in them those imperfections that she felt as beauty and humanity.
At the beginning of her career, she attempted a path in commercial photography for the fashion world, creating some shots with her husband that even ended up in Vogue. Soon, however, dissatisfaction led her back to her original path.
In 1956, Diane studied with street photographer Lisette Model, who taught her to have more confidence in herself and inspired the photographic journey she wanted to undertake. (down here, pictures by Lizette Modell)
If Modell was the spark for Arbus's inspiration, it was the German photographer August Sander who inspired her compositional method. Sander approached his subjects with a mix of sensitivity and sociological objectivity. (down here, picture by August Sander)
Diane used a wider framing, resulting in greater clarity and a more square photo format, which would distinguish her. For Arbus, photography is a secret about a secret. With her shots, she portrays courage, tenacity, and vulnerability at the same time.
Subjects chosen by the photographer were not particularly novel. They were subcultures already documented: bodybuilders, young criminals, nudists, circus artists, people with dwarfism, and those who transgressed "social norms." The difference that emerges with her predecessors is the amount of time Diane spends with the subjects she photographs and the relationships she builds with them during the process.
For Arbus, a large part of photography is not the photo itself but the adventure and experience of obtaining it. This concept reminds me of the feelings I experienced during the period of my first shots, when a large part of the sensations I wanted to communicate in those photos were actually outside the frame, in the "ineffable moment" that could not be frozen by the camera.
Critics, however, called Arbus insensitive, especially aesthetically toward her subjects, because the artist focused too much on human imperfections and their sense of disappointment, taking advantage of her privileged position and social advantage to distance herself from subjects that, according to the critics, would cause pity and repulsion.
Diane Arbus perhaps possessed an inner sadness that she saw in some of her subjects and a sense of loneliness that she sought to capture in all of them. According to sources, the photographer allowed her subjects to present themselves as they wished. To give them space and not invade the intimacy and confidence she wanted to capture, she used a camera with a ground glass viewfinder that essentially allowed her to look at the scene with her eyes down, toward the floor, and compose the shot easily without holding the camera in front of her face as a sort of wall to hide the photographer's face from the subjects. Instead, in this way, she could keep the camera lower, look up to interact with people, eliciting a different reaction and intimacy that is not possible when looking at the scene to be captured through a traditional viewfinder.
Diane believed that if she did not photograph the things she saw as she saw them, they would never exist for anyone else. Her style is characterized by intense realism and deep empathy for her subjects, and her photos aimed to capture the space between who a person is and who they think they are. However, her career never fully took off, and in July 1971, the photographer took her own life. She was 48 years old.
The impact of her photography has influenced not only photographers but artists of at least three subsequent generations. Two of her most famous photos are the photo of the boy with the toy grenade, which has become a recognized symbol still today and is said to have also inspired the character of Bart Simpson, and the photo of the twin girls, which would inspire director Stanley Kubrick for the iconic scene in the film The Shining.
In the last phase of her career, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York asked to purchase these shots, paying $75 each. A print of the boy's photo was sold for $700,000 in 2015.
A year after her death, in 1972, Diane Arbus became the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale exhibition, finally establishing her fame.
