Word: arbus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...girl, Arbus never seemed to live in the real world, as Bosworth repeatedly emphasizes. To her, "the real world was always a fantasy". While growing up, she was unaware of her Jewishness because she was surrounded by it. Later, as a fledgling photographer, she would cover the American Nazi Party in Yorkville and listen to the anti-Semitic diatribe. "She did not react; she just listened intensely--watching, watching. And she arranged to photograph the Nazis. And they were charmed...
...fight the sense of unreality induced by a comfortable childhood, Arbus would ride the subway for hours at at time to observe the freaks of everyday life, the albino messenger boy, a girl with a purple birthmark. She continued to fight what she thought was a sheltered life by planting herself in unpleasant situations. When her husband Allan received training as an army photographer, her inexperienced hand took up the camera. Her first subject was the bare lightbulb hanging from their ceiling. Later, when a dead whale washed onshore in New Jersey, she took a bus there to photograph...
...there were occasional retreats on her progression to confronting the life of the circus side-show. For several years, Arbus inhabited the world of fashion photography, working in the shadow of her husband. Still, everywhere she went, she made an impression. Well-known artcritc Alex Eliot, grandson of President Eliot of Harvard, was infatuate by her: "no matter how well we thought we knew her, she was elusive--an enchantress." One of her closest friends remembers her as a "young woman with the most extraordinary presence about her--she seemed haunted. She had wild, startling eyes, and she was carrying...
BOSWORTH SEES HER break with the fashion world as the turning point in Arbus' career, the moment she went form being a photographer to being an artist. Forbidden as a young girl from even looking at freaks, she now stared. She began to prowl the streets of New York-late at night, when the train stations were "deep, empty, odoriferous-'like pits of hell''' and when the freaks-came out. Soon she became a regular at Hubert's Freak Museum. Staring at the hideous figures, she felt fear run its course through her body and she was determined to conquer...
Even on assignments for the top magazines, Arbus let her taste for the seemy show. On an assignment for Esquire, along with photos of all American scenes like the police academy and a Boy Scout meeting she included shots of brothers, morgues and seedy hotels. Later she photographed dwarfs and freaks, confronting them with the raw camera lens, trying to dig beneath their freakish appearance and get at their human core. More than anything else, she hoped to present freaks an normal people trapped in abnormal bodies...