Word: arbus
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Portraits: the Work of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Weegee, August Sanders, and Home Shapshots--Elsa Dorfman, Mather game room...
...automatic fate of any woman photographer with a taste for images of neurosis to be compared with the late Diane Arbus. Actually, with Mark, the comparison is not very useful. The harsh solipsism of Arbus' shots, their frontal, specimen-like character, the sense that one is conspiratorially sharing a taste for alienation - none of that emerges from "Ward 81." Mark does not skimp on desperation. There are grotesqueries, like the image of a male patient beginning a hand stand - a knot of barely decipherable limbs, a weird sculpture on the glittering linoleum. But the general character of the photographs...
SOMETIMES THE observer-observed phenomenon in Welfare is grotesque, but through the grotesqueness there are glimpses of beauty and humor. Wiseman uses film a lot like Diane Arbus used the still picture. He invites a pose, and his subjects each treat his excellent camera man. William Brayne in a different way, depending it seems on the way they view what the camera means. A middle-aged woman waiting in a seat, a platinum blond with hair teased into a mountainous bundle and skin with wrinkles still dimly perceptible under heavy makeup turns her head to the side and looks...
...object or building in its surroundings--or they are shot from what appears to be a random, arbitrary view, as one would happen upon something while walking down a street. This "snapshot" approach has become the vogue in recent years with such photographers as Bill Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and, to some extent, Robert Frank, and these last three are, indeed, the photographers Evans named as his favorite young photographers. In his humble, gentlemanly manner--he even asked the audience's permission to be seated--he seemed loath to discuss his "competitors" further for fear of becoming "invidious...
...Diane Arbus subjected her "freaks" to a glaring white light that revealed every pore and blemish. Her photographs are often cruel but not easily forgotten. Her approach is obviously not the only valid one--sympathy and affection are just as legitimate responses for the photographer to have to his subject as clinical detachment. But Dorfman fails to use her emotional response as a means to create a compelling image and in doing so, fails to fulfill one of the photographer's essential responsibilities...