Favorite Photo Reviews 6: Judith Thurman's "Exposure Time"

Diane Arbus, Untitled (7) (1970-71)

This is the fifth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” (The New Yorker, October 13, 2003; included in her 2007 essay collection Cleopatra’s Nose).

It’s a review of two Diane Arbus exhibition catalogues: Diane Arbus: Family Albums and Diane Arbus: Revelations. Thurman calls these books “judicious” and says they “give perspective to her [Arbus’s] intentions and, in the process, to her character.”

Thurman describes Arbus’s photos as “creepy.” She says,

Looking at Arbus’s work, one has that visceral shock of the forbidden. It’s creepy not because her subjects are handicapped, loony, hideous, bizarre, sad, or perverse (though most of them are) but because there is something fundamentally taboo about the way she bares their primitive substance without their seeming to know it. The beholder’s shudder relates to the memory, conscious or not, of that ancient nightmare in which one walks through the school cafeteria besmirched by some human stain while thinking one is safely clothed. Our dignity depends upon continence in the broadest sense of the word, and Arbus’s subjects leak their souls.

Thurman says that “Arbus’s lasting contribution to modern art is as a portraitist.” She compares Arbus with the great German portraitist August Sander (1876-1964):

Arbus’s freaks may have been the objects of her “sweet lust,” but she doesn’t fetishize them, and they were never a cabinet of specimens to her the way Sander’s pageant of anonymous German types was to him. On the other hand, Sander was concerned with class distinctions and social roles, while Arbus harrowed the more subjective, unstable terrain of eroticism and gender. Some of her sitters—in a way, all of them—seem not to have noticed how far their forms have strayed from those of the creatures they were supposed to be. They are members of a transitional species who inhabit a limbo where young girls wear the blasted look of menopausal women; middle-aged homosexuals pass themselves off as femmes fatales; dyspeptic infants grimace with the bloated rage of old men; and bodies are mortified with pins, fire, hormones, needles, knives, razors, makeup, surgery, and strobe lights.

Thurman identifies “depth” as a key element of Arbus’s style:

Perhaps Arbus seems ruthless because she exposes her subjects’ naïve faith in their connection with and resemblance to the rest of humanity even as she cuts them from the herd. While they may pose with a lover or in family groups (the Jewish giant and his parents; the dominatrix and her client; the blasé suburbanites on their chaises longues; the blind couple in bed; the Russian midget and his friends; the bespectacled, obese nudists; the woman with her baby monkey), their illusion of belonging is belied by her exposé of their isolation. The depth that Arbus gives to that isolation both as a social fact and as a psychological predicament distinguishes her style from the superficial flamboyance of other photographers (now legion) who specialize, fashionably and forgettably, in the grotesque. It also sinks her subjects into a well so deep that one feels they will never be able to emerge.

My favourite part of Thurman’s review is her superb description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7) (1970-71):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is inspired!