June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #2 "Janet Malcolm's 'Forty-one False Starts' - Part II"

This is the ninth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts – Part II” (June 25, 2013):

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (Marcella Matthaei) (1969)

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’ ”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

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

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She's more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

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 “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 very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s great to see them preserved between hard covers.

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!

My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

June 6 & 13, 2016 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is a fabulous treat, not because it’s the Fiction Issue, but because it contains four delectable critical pieces – James Wood’s "Making the Cut," Anthony Lane’s "In the Picture," Alex Ross’s "Cello Nation," and Peter Schjeldahl’s "The Future Looked Bright."

Wood’s “Making the Cut,” is a review of Emma Cline’s novel The Girls. To my knowledge, it’s the first piece in which Wood criticizes use of sentence fragments. First, he praises such usage. He says, “Generally, Cline favors sentence fragments, sharp scintillae of impressions, and by and large these ably forward her project: Evie, unmoored, lost, greedily swallows the world, in bright pieces.” But later, he comments,

One strength of the novel gradually becomes a vulnerability. Cline loves phrasal fragments: “The dark maritime cypress packed tight outside the window, the twitch of salt air.” Or this, near the end of the book, as the victims are herded into Mitch’s living room: “Linda in her underpants, her big T-shirt—she must have thought that as long as she was quiet and polite, she’d be fine. Trying to reassure Christopher with her eyes. The chub of his hand in hers, his untrimmed fingernails.” This is a metonymic style, in which the zealously chosen detail (those untrimmed fingernails) stands in for a larger set of facts. It looks like tidied-up Joyce (a version of stream of consciousness), but it is really broken-up Flaubert: heavily visual, it fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail.

And, in his concluding paragraph, he says,

The sentence fragment is suddenly everywhere in fiction today, and increasingly seems an emblematic unit of the literary age. It is vivid and provisional, inhabits the vital moment, and renders the world in a cascade of tiled perceptions. But it also tends to restrict a novel’s ability to make large connections, larger coherences, the expansion and deepening of its themes.

This is a variation on Wood’s case against Flaubert and the “cult of the detail” (How Fiction Works). A sentence fragment is almost pure detail. It’s a form of description. I relish it. Consider the following passage from Iain Sinclair’s superb Ghost Milk:

Studying the Ordinance Survey Map for the Thames Estuary, I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit you with tank traps, warning notices. Military firing range keep out. Rusting metal poles looped with fresh barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by a sharp-angled Vorticist alphabet of obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling back into aggregate dunes, darkly shadowed lakes and refuse dumps. Cattle, on strips of land between tricky creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, the smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. When the coastal path failed, I tried the quiet back road: running up against ponds reserved for the angling club of Marconi Electronic Systems, the privileged fishermen of BAE Systems. A huddle of police cottages monitored access to North Level Marsh and the London Stone. Private MOD road. Residents and visitors to police cottages only. I backtracked, walked for hours – and eventually found myself, once more, on the wrong side of the Yantlet, near the colony of huts and holiday homes where my original walk started. The only stones to be found were a blunt obelisk commemorating the “completion of the Raising of the Thames Flood Defences between 1975-85” and a compacted cairn, like the remains of a fireplace after a bomb blast, from which the plaque had been removed.

This passage is substantially built of sentence fragments. It’s a typical Sinclair construction. What would Wood make of it? Would he choke on it? In How Fiction Works, he says, “But I choke on too much detail.” Is this description of the Thames Estuary too much? Do its nine sentence fragments restrict its meaning? Yes, it’s heavily visual. Does it fetishize detail or does it vigorously and vividly evoke a walk along an industrial river, put us squarely there with Sinclair as he searches for the London Stone? Wood’s view on sentence fragments raises interesting questions. I hope he elaborates on it in future pieces.

Anthony Lane’s “In the Picture,” a review of Arthur Lubow’s Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, is a positive delight, as are all his photography pieces. I wish he’d collect them in a book. There are at least ten (counting the Arbus piece) that I know of – “A Balzac of the Camera” (Eugène Atget) “The Eye of the Land” (Walker Evans), “The Shutterbug” (William Klein), “Faces in the Crowd” (August Sander), “Road Show” (Robert Frank), “Candid Camera” (on the Leica camera), “Some Bodies” (Irving Penn), “Head On” (Richard Avedon), and “Shadows and Fog” (Edward Steichen). The first three are included in Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, but the rest are uncollected.

“In the Picture” contains several wonderful epigrammatic lines:

Freaks may abound in her art, but not once do they freak her out.

It was as if “Leaves of Grass,” in need of an update, had been handed to Sylvia Plath.

All creatures great and small: nothing was foreign to Arbus, as she roamed the human zoo.

Even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors.

Imprecision, like mercy, did not make them less true.

My favorite line in “In the Picture” is Lane’s reaction to Lubow’s description of a mosquito biting Arbus’s breast:

When a mosquito lands on his subject, Lubow is right there: “Changing its strategy, the insect whined upward and then landed on the nipple of her right breast. This time, it sank its feeder deep into her flesh and drank.” Even Boswell never got that close.

Alex Ross’s “Cello Nation” reviews Los Angeles’s Piatigorsky International Cello Festival. I’m not a cello fan. But I read Ross’s piece anyway because I savor his writing. “Cello Nation” 's last paragraph is a beauty. Ross writes,

The performance that will stay longest in my mind, though, was of the Elgar concerto, with the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk. No player at the festival produced a handsomer tone: Mørk had the benefit of a magnificent instrument, a 1723 Domenico Montagnana, and he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall. As an interpreter, Mørk avoided the noble-minded protocol—the high-school-graduation tread—that is too common in Elgar. Unmannered rubato gave a sense of moment-to-moment improvisation, of a halting search for honest expression. What emerged was a monologue set against a landscape of shadows: the cellist as Shakespearean actor, uneasy with the crown of power.

That “he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall” is inspired!

Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Future Looked Bright,” a review of the Guggenheim Museum’s Moholy-Nagy retrospective, brought me news of an exquisite artwork that I was unaware of – László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). Schjeldahl describes it as “a sleek, motorized medley of finely machined rods, screens, perforated disks, and springs in metal, glass, wood, and plastic, set in a box with a circular cut in one side. The gleaming parts—a sort of industrialized synthesis of Cubist and Constructivist styles—reflect a play of colored electric lights inside the box.” He says, “Its rhapsodic inventiveness—there had never been anything like it before—puts it in a class of twentieth-century utopian icons.” A gorgeous photo of this “one-of-a-kind gizmo” illustrates the piece.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue: Bendik Kaltenborn’s "Thundercat" illustration for Matthew Trammell’s "Night Life: Rock Bottom"; Trammell’s “If Bruner’s lifelong craft as a bassist buries him in the low end, his voice beams goldenrod from a crack in the ceiling”; GOAT’s "Art: Mark Lyon" [“Lyon photographs landscapes in upstate New York while standing inside the bays of self-service car washes, boxlike spaces that supply the images with ready-made frames (graced by the occasional hose). The views—gas-station pumps, strip malls, a swatch of unnaturally green lawn—are transformed by Lyon’s keen eye. He works in daylight and darkness alike, regardless of weather, as fog, rain, and falling snow turn the everyday oddly magical”]; Jiayang Fan’s “The joy of Korean barbecue lies in part in its performance: watching ruby-red curls of brisket caramelize while translucent slices of Pringle-shaped tongue sizzle, crisp-edged and glinting” ("Tables For Two: Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong"); and Becky Cooper’s terrific "Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely," which I’m tempted to quote in full (it’s so damn good), but instead will simply highlight this superb detail: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” Check out the newyorker.com version of Cooper’s column; it features a wonderful Julia Rothman illustration. 

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part II

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (Marcella Matthaei)," 1969

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

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

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She is much more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

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 “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 very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s good to see them preserved between hard covers.

(This the second part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm's Forty-one False Starts.)