Word: arbus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...manipulations that turn pictures into smooth lies. This is history that gives more time to mass-market phenomena and socially concerned work than anything formalist, unengaged or inward. So LIFE magazine, tabloids and the child-labor photos of Lewis Hine are all nicely served. Minor White, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston rate less than a shutter click of mention. That's not the whole picture...
Think of Weegee as a chronological and psychological midpoint between two utterly different photographers. One is the turn-of-the-century muckraker Jacob Riis, who saw New York City as a social problem to be solved. The other is Diane Arbus, who found in the city life of the 1960s a psychic spectacle of creepy fascination. Weegee haunts the same kind of shabby neighborhoods that Riis did. But what goes on in Weegee's festive, suffering, unsanitary New York is a sight to be enjoyed more than clucked over. The tenements that preoccupied Riis, a moralist and social reformer...
...same time, Weegee had begun to detect that freakish charge in the metropolitan air that would become the signature mood of Arbus' work. There's a feral quality in a lot of the good citizens of Weegee's New York. You catch it in the gleaming eyes of the kids at a crime scene in Their First Murder; these are children who are thrilled, or at the very least intrigued, by the sight of a dead body. In some of his other people there's a passivity that is no less unnerving. You see it in his picture of Irma...
...WOULD DISPUTE THAT Harry Callahan has a reputation. He's a venerated name in postwar photography. What he lacks is a legend, the personal drama that turns a mere photographer into a cultural celebrity. Diane Arbus had her demons. Robert Frank has his melancholy. Richard Avedon has his glamour, so much of it that Hollywood turned his life into Funny Face. Callahan taught art school in Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island. Not much of a role there for Fred Astaire...
During his tenure as associate curator, Pratt established Harvard's teaching collection of photographs, which is dominated by the works of Ben Shahn, Diane Arbus, Aaron Siskind, Ansel Adams, 19th century European and American photographers and emerging contemporary photographers...