Tate Modern is currently offering the opportunity to view over 40 of Diane Arbus’ black and white images spanning the period from the 1950s to the ‘70s. Containing some of her best known images, the collection is owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland and is one of the largest Arbus collection in existence.
Diane Arbus (1923–71) is widely acknowledged as one of the finest modern photographers through her startling and perceptive images of contemporary American life. Arbus started as a fashion-photographer but moved towards personal projects recording ‘things which nobody would see unless I photographed them’. She is known for her portraits of people whose appearance or lifestyle position them on the margins of “conventional” society - although the very notion of conventionality is repeatedly challenged in her work.
So we see in this collection Arbus’ portraits, always centred in a square frame and usually lit theatrically with flash, a miscellany of social misfits - a human pincushion, heavily tatooed men and women, a sword swallower, midgets, suburban nudists, Jewish giants and dwarves, even a (apparently) headless man and woman. Arbus often befriended her subjects and the intimacy which this generated comes through; she brought a humane and intensely personal approach to her often unconventional subjects, redefining documentary photography with a new aethestic purpose.
But the range is wider than these well-known subjects. Many address the theme of gender identity and Arbus often photographed transvestites and transsexuals (for instance, Two female impersonators backstage, N.Y.C 1961; A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966); sub-groups like ethnic minorities (Puerto Rican women with a beauty mark, N.Y.C. 1965); nudists (Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963); wealthy socialites (Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in an evening gown, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. 1968); and the residents of mental institutions, whose faces are often hidden behind ghoulish masks (in a series of Untitled images).
This collection shows how Arbus brought the same insights into her images of “ordinary” people. Photographing people in the parks of New York, on the streets or at home, the images seem to be “conventional”. But look beneath the surface.
A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.C 1966, made for the Sunday Times Magazine, is a searing indictment of suburban consumerist life. Xmastree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963 is as stark and bare as the life we don’t see in the image. Teenage couple on Hudson street NYC is disturbing, the not-quire-children dressed in adult clothes and appearing like midgets. Young political activists and patriotic youths with the flag seem deranged and other subjects roll their eyes in a disconcerting fashion. Even the sole landscape in the collection - a house on a hill, dark and brooding - suggests something sinister behind the shutters.
This collection is an fantastic overview of Arbus’ remarkable work.
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Posted by: Illumwat | 02/13/2012 at 09:11 AM