Diane Arbus

Today I went to the Diane Arbus exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery. This is the third time I've been to an exhibition of hers; the first was in Barcelona, the second in Edinburgh.

Her images, yet again, demanded my attention; they get my full attention. I'm drawn into them and quite stunned by them. They open up an America different from that normally portrayed. Many of her subjects were on the fringe of society. But she also captured familiar things and made them look strange e.g. the shot with the large Christmas tree in the corner. Some of the more exotic characters have very familiar items beside them; box of tissues, toilet paper, talc; etc. Some of the pictures are almost shocking in their purity and honesty but others have too much of their self hidden by masks or clothes or props. Her photos of nudists, drag queens, midgets, giants, suburban couples can be quite haunting.

Perhaps most haunting of all are her images from the institute of the mentally retarded (as it was called then.) As Nan Golden said about the shots of inmates taken outside, 


...often in masks and costumes for Halloween, or on picnics, or just frolicking on the grounds. Among these are some of Arbus, most beautiful and unforgettable photographs of all. The vision of a mentally disabled patient dressed as a ghost with a skeleton mask, or of a couple in a dunce, hat and clown suit holding hands on a wide lawn under a dark somber sky, looks like Grimm's fairy tales. The people become characters in a medievel theater or a Pirandello play. Somehow these pictures describe the experience of being institutionalized, not from a documentary viewpont but from the magical and symbolic realm where reality sometimes arrives. They bring round other poets of darkness like Goya, or Pasolini, or George Grosz.
...after the amazing photographs of a bizarre parade of patients in nightgowns and bonnets and fake mustaches leading one another across a dark field like the blind leading the blind, one still feels it's fair to assume that after this Arbus felt there was nowhere left to go. ( Quoted from here.)


Apart from being enthralled by the subject matter, I found myself trying to analyse her style some more. I wondered why she stood where she did to take a shot; why she included so much of the surroundings; why she came in so close; did she care that she was shooting this portrait in the mid-day sun?; did she not see that tree in the background sticking out of the boy's head?; why did she not care about cutting off their feet? I couldn't come to an 'Arbus approach' to a shoot. You had to have the empathy and internal pain of Arbus to shoot like, and think like her. She must have felt like an outsider, a freak, perhaps even mentally retarded herself at times, to see the world as she did. 


I wasn't disappointed by a third visit to a Diane Arbus exhibition. I could, and do, stare at her work for ages. They are narratives of, not only the subject matter, but of Arbus herself. Since her suicide in 1971, we seem to be searching in the photos for clues about her mental state, just like people do when a friend commits suicide. They go back over thing said, actions, hints, any clues at all that could have foreseen and perhaps, prevented the tragic event.


As I always do when I go to Aberdeen Art Gallery, I end my visit by looking at the four Francesca Woodman photographs they have. Another tragedy, another set of mesmerising photographs.