Word: arbus
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...Jewish joke goes, "How do you make a Romanian omelet? First, steal two eggs." Glass's programs sound as if their creator began by stealing a microphone. He finds--uncovers--drama and humor in the most pedestrian of places. O thou woods colt of Lord Buckley, out of Diane Arbus. Go thou and conquer...
...Like Arbus, Mark also enjoys the ways in which people construct fantasies of themselves, like the old girl in a ballroom gown who has been happily swept off her feet by a dance partner in Jerry Hill and Margaret Sell. In another shot, Vera Antinoro, Rhoda Camporato and Murray Goldman, two aging glamour girls strut their stuff, what there is of it. They may seem at first to be clueless about themselves, until you realize that they are onto something about all of us, something that has to do with the need to persevere in roles that give us pleasure...
Mark came of age at a moment when a lot of young photographers were looking at the unsentimental pictures of Robert Frank, William Klein and Diane Arbus and wondering whether their saturnine styles could be fitted to the warmer aims of documentary photography. Arbus, especially, didn't seem to take much interest in the people in her pictures for themselves. What she cared about was how they could function as emblems of the various beasts within us. Mark is not such a remote operator. She plainly does care about the struggling families and strenuously upbeat old people she has photographed...
...Inferno, which takes its name and epigraph from Dante, is Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya and Kosovo. It is gruesome stuff, some of the most grisly and horrifying photography I have ever seen, and certainly not right for you if your tastes fall on the squeamish side of Diane Arbus. Nachtwey surpasses in pure disgust value even Joel-Peter Witkin, who is known for raiding Mexican morgues in search of subjects. In one Nachtwey photograph taken in Rwanda in 1994, a carcass lies rotting in front of a church; the fact that it hasn't been removed hints that there are more...
...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...