Word: arbus
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...favorite thing is to go where I've never been," said Diane Arbus; in the summer of 1971, aged 48, she killed herself. Before her death she was beginning to be recognized in art circles as the photographer who had subjected the hallucinated blankness of urban life, mostly in and around New York, where she was born and lived, to a uniquely truthful scrutiny, like Eurydice with a lens in the tunnel to Hades. A year has passed, and now Arbus is as much a cult figure as Sylvia Plath; a collection of her photographs...
...Arbus' vision was exactly opposite to the flabby Family of Man attitude that still governs most photographic responses to the human animal. Everyman is a poor subject. There is compromise in the very act of shooting a person as if he or she were "really the same as me"; it means a flattening of human experience, a generality that amounts to well-meant condescension. In brief, it is sentiment. In her passion for "not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like," Diane Arbus became perhaps the least sentimental photographer who ever caught a face in the view...
...even loneliness is shared by the extraordinary cast of freaks, hustlers, staring twins, leathery nudists and child dancing champions who populate Arbus' prints. Loneliness merely exists among them. Arbus' people own no common baggage and barely even possess themselves. Her theme was not so much personality as defensiveness; the limits of human gesture amazed her. "Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way, and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw...Our whole...
Greaser also has a son, a sniveling little freak called Lamy Homo (Michael Sullivan), whom he keeps murdering and Jessy (Allan Arbus) keeps raising from the dead. "If ya feel, ya heal," is the way Jessy's laying on of hands proceeds, and others besides Lamy benefit too. A cripple, once healed by Jessy, passes the rest of the movie dragging himself from one scene to another, thankfully crying "I can crawl again...
...Diane Arbus is representative of this modern trend. She has photographed new subjects (transvestites, homosexuals and fat nudists), and in this exhibit has a picture. "Identical Twins" that is quite modern in several aspects. It is a print made from only half of a 35-mm negative that has been enlarged and cropped so that it is surrounded on three sides by thick black lines (the unexposed edges of the film). This produces what is called by scientists the "orientation response," and by artists, a pun on the ambiguous relationship between art (the process of creation) and reality. Remember Blow...