Jun 18, 2016 02:31 AM
https://theamericanscholar.org/annals-of...123ufkrJrQ
EXCERPT: Diane Arbus is one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers [...] Arbus was a classic portraitist, positioning her subjects by ones and twos at the center of her camera’s square frame and having them look straight into the lens in a manner [...] But what subjects they were! Nudists, dwarfs, sword swallowers, transvestites, autistic adults, and possibly normative children who acted bizarrely under Arbus’s scrutiny—together they constitute a menagerie of human oddity. The shorthand she used for them was “freaks,” but the term does justice neither to their diversity nor to the emotional intensity she brought to the task. In the 45 years since her suicide at age 48, her pictures have retained both their shock value and their gnomic instability, teetering between the poles of documentation and invention, reality and dream.
[...] The manner of Arbus’s death, like that of poet Sylvia Plath and, in a newer generation, photographer Francesca Woodman, has become part of her artistic legacy, as if her untimely end resulted inevitably from her work. Not to mention the male-dominated world in which she lived, which, as some feminists have asserted, helped undercut her sense of self-worth. But there was plenty going on with Arbus psychologically—depression, sexual promiscuity, incest, and a declining ability to form and keep meaningful relationships—that had nothing to do with her art or ambition. She was quite simply a mess of a human being.
Journalist Arthur Lubow attempts to make this mess coherent and compelling in "Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer," the second such account we have of her life. [...] The result is a longer, more comprehensive account of Arbus’s life and work, but one that is far less enjoyable to read. Although it contains no radically new thesis about how her life may have influenced her work, the book is full of titillating information about Arbus’s sexual escapades. The biggest shocker is the assertion that she had sex with her brother, the esteemed poet Howard Nemerov, sporadically from adolescence until a few weeks before she died.
[...] Lubow supplies pages of description of Arbus’s photographs, both well known and recently unearthed, as well as a list of all the pictures he mentions in his text. But the images themselves are absent, the Arbus estate having refused the necessary permissions. [...] Why then did Lubow bother with this decade-long task? Presumably, he had hoped his biography would differentiate itself from prior efforts, either by unearthing new facts or by reimagining the information already at hand. In either case, our reward would have been a brighter illumination of his subject’s importance. But a photographer’s life is a tough nut to crack. Especially Arbus’s. Arbus famously said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret.” She meant this to apply to all successful photographs, but it seems particularly apt for her own....
EXCERPT: Diane Arbus is one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers [...] Arbus was a classic portraitist, positioning her subjects by ones and twos at the center of her camera’s square frame and having them look straight into the lens in a manner [...] But what subjects they were! Nudists, dwarfs, sword swallowers, transvestites, autistic adults, and possibly normative children who acted bizarrely under Arbus’s scrutiny—together they constitute a menagerie of human oddity. The shorthand she used for them was “freaks,” but the term does justice neither to their diversity nor to the emotional intensity she brought to the task. In the 45 years since her suicide at age 48, her pictures have retained both their shock value and their gnomic instability, teetering between the poles of documentation and invention, reality and dream.
[...] The manner of Arbus’s death, like that of poet Sylvia Plath and, in a newer generation, photographer Francesca Woodman, has become part of her artistic legacy, as if her untimely end resulted inevitably from her work. Not to mention the male-dominated world in which she lived, which, as some feminists have asserted, helped undercut her sense of self-worth. But there was plenty going on with Arbus psychologically—depression, sexual promiscuity, incest, and a declining ability to form and keep meaningful relationships—that had nothing to do with her art or ambition. She was quite simply a mess of a human being.
Journalist Arthur Lubow attempts to make this mess coherent and compelling in "Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer," the second such account we have of her life. [...] The result is a longer, more comprehensive account of Arbus’s life and work, but one that is far less enjoyable to read. Although it contains no radically new thesis about how her life may have influenced her work, the book is full of titillating information about Arbus’s sexual escapades. The biggest shocker is the assertion that she had sex with her brother, the esteemed poet Howard Nemerov, sporadically from adolescence until a few weeks before she died.
[...] Lubow supplies pages of description of Arbus’s photographs, both well known and recently unearthed, as well as a list of all the pictures he mentions in his text. But the images themselves are absent, the Arbus estate having refused the necessary permissions. [...] Why then did Lubow bother with this decade-long task? Presumably, he had hoped his biography would differentiate itself from prior efforts, either by unearthing new facts or by reimagining the information already at hand. In either case, our reward would have been a brighter illumination of his subject’s importance. But a photographer’s life is a tough nut to crack. Especially Arbus’s. Arbus famously said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret.” She meant this to apply to all successful photographs, but it seems particularly apt for her own....