The cleaners at MoMA in New York began the workday by removing spit from the glass that protected their photographs. They were thrown by visitors, annoyed at the supposed obscenity of what they observed. The legend may be apocryphal, but it is convincing given the diabolical reputation that Diane Arbus had before ingesting a cocktail of barbiturates and cutting her veins in 1971. That year, Artforum magazine made her the first photographer to occupy its cover and published a selection of images that soon became milestones, such as her portraits of the evil twins, the Jewish giant with her parents (several sizes less) or the impúber boy demonstrating in favor of the war in Vietnam. Around that time, Arbus had a dream: the Titanic was sinking and she was trapped in one of its golden elevators. "There is no hope," he wrote in his diary. Two months later, he committed suicide.
"He was an isolated figure. As a photographer, her aspirations were singular and she had no connection to the prevailing aesthetic of her time," says Neil Selkirk, who apprenticed to her after working as an assistant to photographers such as Richard Avedon. After Arbus's death, he was in charge of executing the enlargements of the negatives that were to be part of the great retrospective that MoMA dedicated to him in 1972, which ended up traveling throughout the country. It was visited by seven million people. Critic Robert Hughes said his photos altered "the experience of the human face." They would change the history of their discipline, which had ceased to be a minor art, and the posthumous destiny of its leader. "Months before his death, the Metropolitan of New York bought him two photographs for $25 each," his former assistant recalls by email. Today the most iconic are sold for figures approaching one million euros. "Although, because the best-known images are so powerful, they tend to obscure what may be easier to see in lesser-known ones: what you were looking for and where you wanted to go," says Selkirk, who to this day remains the only person allowed to enlarge his photos.
'A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, New York, 1970', one of Diane Arbus' best-known photos.Graphic House (Getty Images)
Revolutionary but exhibited incessantly in recent decades, her work seemed well known by now. Actually, there are other Arbus to discover. Coinciding with the centenary of her birth in 1923, the most complete exhibition ever dedicated to Diane Arbus has just been inaugurated in the French city of Arles, where the Luma Foundation exhibits 454 photographs of the artist, a third of which are unpublished. It is the result of the acquisition of this priceless set of snapshots by the Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann, heiress of the Roche pharmaceutical empire – to which we owe the Valium and the Lexomil – and responsible for this artistic complex inaugurated in 2021 in the place where Van Gogh lost his head, presided over by a silver brick tower designed by Frank Gehry.
The first reaction to the exhibition, entitled Constellation, is bewilderment. The photographs are exhibited in a metallic structure, black and somewhat ostentatious, without posters or panels in sight, in a deliberate and somewhat aestheticizing anarchy, devoid of theoretical discourse. These four hundred images are exhibited without order or concert, except for the famous A Box of Ten Photographs, the portfolio in which Arbus worked before dying with the idea of making an edition of 50 copies, of which he only completed eight. He sold only four to people around him, such as Jasper Johns or Avedon himself, who bought two and gave one to director Mike Nichols.
His work, made up of thousands of portraits, also has a collective dimension: it is a great dissident altarpiece of America made by a daughter of immigrants.
Trapped in the spider's web of the exhibition, new ideas emerge about a work that we thought was trite. There are, of course, his portraits of everyday monsters, circus characters, street transvestites, tattooed men and disturbing children. But, with a little distance, we also observe a collective dimension, a large dissident portrait of America made by the daughter of Russian immigrants but well-to-do, owners of the luxury department store Russeks in the heart of Manhattan. Arbus, which The New Yorker once defined as "the American Goya", portrays a Christmas tree next to the newly purchased lamp, still covered in cellophane, an ominous picture of a consumer society that, no matter how hard it tries, is only capable of causing unhappiness. Then he goes to Disneyland and, instead of immortalizing the hysterical happiness of the place, prefers to photograph a cardboard castle in a misty frame, after sunset and without princes charming in sight.
The possibilities of combinatorics are almost endless: each walk through the exhibition gives rise to an unprecedented reading. In the second attempt, identity emerges as construction, gender as disguise, the truth that the mask transmits. In the third, a primordial representation of urban cultures in a country in full transformation, of the growing complexity of the social landscape of the sixties and the legacy of countercultural activism of the previous decade, led by other children of immigrants who highlighted the conflict between the individual and the mass, or the narrowness of American dogma, of which she did not stop reflecting the dark face. Arbus photographed Mae West, but not in her golden age, but as an eccentric old woman who lived surrounded by baby monkeys. And also Brenda Frazier, a young woman of high society famous in heart magazines. But he portrayed her at age 44, after a psychotic break and a failed marriage.
More than monstrous, his images are ominous, a term that fits better with the Freudian dimension of a work that seems to have a subconscious: Arbus exposes what his characters, and perhaps also his spectators, try to hide about themselves. "Do you know that any mother has nightmares about getting pregnant in case her child is born and is a monster?" she wrote to a friend when she took the photo of the giant Eddie Carmel at her parents' home in the Bronx. "I think I got that in that mother's gaze."
'Family in their garden on a Sunday in Westchester, New York, 1968'. DIANE ARBUS © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Collection Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation
What remains of Arbus' artistic legacy today? We find it in Nan Goldin's photos, in the apology of human imperfection that her chronicle of the margins emerges, where art and life seem to mix. "He was able to look at the faces we usually avoid with our eyes and show the beauty and pain in them," Goldin once wrote. The same can be said of the portraits of Wolfgang Tillmans in the alternative scene of Berlin and London during his youth. From Martin Parr's photographs in hospitals during the seventies, followed by documentaries dedicated by teachers such as Frederick Wiseman and Raymond Depardon to psychiatric services. From Susan Meiselas' series about the striptease subculture in deep America. Of the self-portraits of Francesca Woodman, who seems to direct that inclement look that Arbus sometimes had towards herself, or of the parodic version of that more trivial monstrosity that Cindy Sherman sketches in her portraits. Of the terrifying twins of The Shining, inspired by the mythical image that Arbus made of two girls in Roselle, New Jersey, in 1967. Of Alec Soth's chance encounters in the relative marginality of the Midwest. We detect Arbus in the stories of Carmen Maria Machado, between the biographical and the magical realism of folklore. In the vindication of the freak that made the first Lady Gaga. In Don Draper's fleeting encounters in the chaos of Manhattan in the early sixties, so close and so far from his idyllic suburb. In the street surveys of any television news and in the testimonies of those anonymous who never suspected that their neighbor was a psychopath. He looked like a normal person.
It destroyed the barriers of nineteenth-century portraiture, when it was reserved for the privileged. "With Arbus, social background no longer matters. We all have the right to representation," says Marta Gili
Arbus once defined the men and women he photographed as "characters from an adult fairy tale." He thus underlined the fantastic component of his images, as in the fables of the Brothers Grimm or in the journalistic texts about circus companies signed by Joseph Mitchell, whom he asked for advice when he started. "I told him that freaks could be as boring and ordinary as so-called normal people," he warned. That the dream of Olga, the bearded woman, was to work as a stenographer and take care of the geraniums she had planted on her windowsill. The eternal debate, originating in the sixties, is whether Arbus mocked his characters. If he used them, he gained their trust and betrayed them with unflattering portraits that enhanced their supposed monstrosity. Susan Sontag was one of Arbus' fiercest enemies with her 1973 essay Freak Show, which she later included in On Photography. The writer saw in her images an attitude "based on distance and privilege", which resulted in voyeuristic portraits of people "pathetic and regrettable, as well as repulsive". "Do you know how grotesque they are? They don't seem to know," he wrote.
Sontag herself allowed herself to be photographed by Arbus once. Like almost all of her characters, she was unhappy. Two photographs from his 1972 MoMA exhibition were removed. One, because the model's father, a teenage girl, threatened to sue the museum: Arbus had portrayed his daughter "as a lesbian." The other was a photo of Viva Hoffmann, Warhol's collaborator, which was also not liked. "A lot of bad things have happened to me, but that portrait is the worst of all," he said. Norman Mailer, pictured in full body spreading, said that leaving a camera to Arbus was like "putting a grenade in the hands of a child", in reference to one of his best-known photos, the portrait of a boy with a toy explosive.
Diane Arbus, portrayed by Elliott Erwitt at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1969, two years before her suicide. Elliott Erwitt (Magnum Photos / ContactPhoto)
Five decades later, critical interpretations of his work are still valid, although less and less. "When you pick up a camera to make a portrait of someone, there's always a power dynamic. But, in her case, it is not appropriate to label her as a predator: she was aware of that power and acted with curiosity and respect, "responds Sarah H. Meister, a great specialist in Arbus, who after 25 years as curator of Photography at the MoMA in New York directs Aperture, a foundation and photographic publishing house created by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange in the fifties. "His images reflect a vulnerability and even encourage it. She was a humanist photographer, in the sense that she demonstrated an abiding interest in the human condition." His work is a monument to ambiguity and a reminder of its inexhaustible power. "Today there are still many photographers who aspire to know the other through the focus of a camera. There is now a greater awareness of the value of trying to understand others, which makes his legacy even more important," adds Meister, who detects in his work the idea that photography can "foster a more just and tolerant society."
The case of Arbus is one of the most resounding examples of the 'death of the author': interpretations of his work have become much more important than his supposed intentions.
The views on his work have changed. In recent years, authors such as Philip Charrier or Frederick Gross have highlighted her relationship with the new journalism or with the metafiction of Borges, whom she also portrayed, and have compared her with the sociological altarpieces of August Sander, Walker Evans or Robert Frank in a postmodern version, as if she were an entomologist far from the encyclopedic and the positivist. and focused on the subaltern categories of society. Although the most tempting extemporaneous rereading might be the one that underlines the acceptability of the non-normative, or even its distracted beauty. Arbus destroyed the barriers of nineteenth-century portraiture, to which only the privileged had access, and made the invisible enter that space of exclusion. "It opened the door for all of us to be photographed," confirms Marta Gili, responsible for two major exhibitions on Arbus: one when she directed the photography department of the Fundació La Caixa, in 2003, and the other as director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, in 2011. "With Arbus, individual status or social background no longer matters. We all have the right to representation," adds Gili, who urges updating certain theses. "His work is still valid, but not the way of analyzing it, which is still anchored in the schemes of the seventies and eighties."
That has happened, in part, because the heirs of Arbus have controlled with an iron hand the use of his works and have ensured that no one moves away "from the established discourse", as Gili points out. "These photographs needed me to safeguard them from the onslaught of theory and interpretation," writes his daughter Doon, head of his estate, in Revelations (Aperture), a volume with 200 photos of Arbus and essays by experts. The family has lost the game. The case of Arbus is one of the most resounding examples of the death of the author, so in vogue when he died: interpretations of his work have become much more important than his supposed intentions, always punctuated by gruesome revelations about his private life (a 2016 biography, by Arthur Lubow, journalist of The New York Times , claimed that he had an incestuous relationship with his older brother.) "The family has tried to perimeter what could be said about their mother and what could not. There is an urgent need to offer critical reflections on the work she left, without any censorship," says Gili, who invites us to move away from the most simplistic readings, such as that Arbus portrayed freaks "because she was too". Basically, who would escape that definition today? Or, rather, who would want to be defined as normal in this present? That may be, after all, the most valuable of all that Arbus has left us in inheritance: a new normal.
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