At the “Scholar’s Gate” entrance to Central Park at 5th Avenue and 60th Street you will find a bronze statue of photographer Diane Arbus, created by sculptor Gillian Wearing, scheduled to be on exhibit until mid-August 2022. Though I have never been to a formal museum exhibit of Arbus’ photography I have always been fascinated with her work; she sought out unusual-appearing subjects, people marginalized by society, especially in the era she worked, the 1950s and 1960s, a time when conformity in habits and dress was a ticket to acceptability, society, marriage and work, things prized above all in the era.
It’s possible, for example, that her 1967 portrait of twin girls from Roselle, NY (seen on this page in the online Sleek magazine) may have influenced Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the two ghost twins in “The Shining.” She also photographed Eddie Carmel, a giant from the Bronx whose 8’9″ height would have dwarfed Andre the Giant, and trans people figured in her work long before their prominence today. A Google search turns up a decent sampler of what you will find with Arbus’ photography. She worked almost exclusively with black and white film.
Though Arbus is credited with showing marginalized people in society, there seems to be a coldness and dispassionateness to her work. Weegee worked in much the same milieu, but I find him much more empathetic than Arbus; there’s a warmness that Arbus did not express. Arbus gained rather more respectability than Weegee, as she was featured regularly in Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and London’s Sunday Times Magazine, and she earned a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Arbus once said her pictures sought to capture “the space between who someone is and who they think they are.” Diane Arbus committed suicide at the Westbeth artists’ residence in the West Village on July 28, 1971.
I am neither an art critic nor a psychoanalyst and will not offer appraisal of her work in either vein. All I can tell you is I enjoyed her work, and sometimes I wish I had the courage to do portrait photography.
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4/11/22