{ 19 }
Click, click, click goes her camera. Later she will develop image after image, all troubling and singular: a Mexican dwarf sitting atop a bed; a Jewish giant in the Bronx towering over his parents; two men dancing together; a transvestite at a drag ball; a woman sitting in a wheelchair, face covered with a scary mask; a hermaphrodite with pet dog; mentally disabled persons in a field; a dominatrix standing over a kneeling client; and an albino sword swallower working at a carnival.
Welcome to the world of Diane Arbus in 1970. She was delighted to wander amongst those shunted to the back alleys, mental hospitals, circuses, and freak shows. While she categorized many of her subjects as freaks, she also called them “aristocrats,” because “they’ve already passed their test in life.”1
Arbus had become nationally known in 1967 when she was one of three photographers (along with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander) featured in the show New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Arbus’s thirty images for the show included her usual selection of straight-on shots of human oddities, oddballs, and outsiders. Her work was displayed in a separate room, cordoned off in a manner so that viewers that might be offended by her images of “the grotesque in life” could avoid seeing them. The New York Times reviewer was conflicted about her work, finding it “relatively static and haunting.” Arbus was able to transform the beautiful into the bizarre. While discovering empathy and even a bit of humor in her work, the reviewer concluded that some of the work “borders close to bad taste.”2 Arbus often returned to the museum to eavesdrop on conversations in the gallery. The ceaseless flow of negative comments depressed her—“ugly,” “hateful,” and “repulsive.”3 Forty years after the show, her curator Szarkowski admitted that he continued to find her images “shocking.” Custodians each night reportedly removed the spittle of angry visitors from the work.4
While the New Documents show made her famous, she had not profited financially. Her images proved to be the kind that few collectors wanted to grace their walls. Museums regularly requested prints, but sometimes without remuneration or mere token payments. Her most pressing concern, then, was to earn money, which she made by doing freelance photo shoots, mostly for magazines. Although she had grown up in a wealthy family on Central Park West in New York City, the family fortune did not support her during adulthood. She had, with her husband Allan, made a good living doing commercial photography; but his heart was in acting and hers in creative photography. By 1969 they had divorced, and he was in California pursuing an acting career (he eventually landed a regular role as the psychiatrist Sidney on the hit show M*A*S*H*).5
Arbus worked commercial gigs on a fairly regular basis to keep herself financially afloat. In 1969, for Harper’s Magazine, she photographed bestselling author Jacqueline Susann long-leggedly splayed across the lap of her husband, who is sitting on a chair; he was, for all we can tell, naked. She had done work, too, for the London Sunday Times and Nova Magazine. As with all of her commercial photography, it was often quite intriguing in conception and realization. One series consisted of portraits of eight individuals “who think they look like other people.” Decked out in appropriate regalia, they do bear uncanny resemblances to Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor, and others of renown. In 1970, she was promised the cover for a special section on children’s fashions for the New York Times; her image was of two four-year-olds, a black girl and a white boy, holding hands.6 Although Arbus considered the image “minor,” she had the temerity to envision it as “a major civil rights breakthrough” by showing “miscegenation, junior style.” The newspaper chose not to use it.7
Nevertheless, 1970 opened on a hopeful note. Arbus had moved into a wonderful, inexpensive apartment in Westbeth. Once the industrial headquarters for Bell Laboratories, the structure in the West Village designed by architect Richard Meier was intended as housing for creative artists. Her apartment featured a sleeping alcove—her bed was covered with a bedspread that she had stitched together, a strange amalgamation of pieces of fur from many different animals (otter, badger, mink, seal, and more). Above the bed was a large blackboard listing varied projects. “Best place I ever had,” she announced.8
One of her current projects was “A Box of Ten Photographs.” The plastic box holding 16” x 20” images was “white like a frame,” looking “almost like ice.” Arbus intended an edition of fifty, each one priced at one thousand dollars. Alas, she sold only four of the boxes in her lifetime (one to painter Jasper Johns), but she was determined to make it a commercial success: “I had better peddle them in real earnest.”9 The box included two images from 1963 as well as recent photographs of the Mexican dwarf and Jewish giant. The collection was representative of Arbus’s oeuvre, for instance, Boy with Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade (1967). The boy in the photo wears a straw hat; he is in a dark suit jacket and sweater. On his lapels are a miniature American-flag bow tie pin (mimicking his own bow tie), a small “Bomb Hanoi” button, and a much larger button reading “God Bless America; Support Our Boys in Vietnam.” The young man’s ears stick out; his look is grim, his smile as flat as a dead man’s EKG. Illuminated by Arbus’s flash, the image was disconcerting—a piece of Americana that has somehow taken a wrong turn.
Included in the collection was her 1970 image of Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant from the Bronx. She had first photographed Carmel in 1960 at the Barnumesque Hubert’s Museum in Times Square. Arbus was a frequent visitor (as was Lenny Bruce) to that seedy palace of the eerie since the 1950s. For twenty-five cents you encountered Estelline, an African American sword swallower; Jack Dracula, an immense man whose body was covered with over three-hundred tattoos; fire dancers; magicians; midgets; exotics from other lands; contortionists; and, for a small extra fee, a room downstairs where fleas performed. Carmel was billed as “The World’s Biggest Cowboy.” At close to eight feet in height and more than three hundred pounds this was certainly not deceptive, at least, where size was concerned.10 Size did not convey power, however. Arbus always felt that he was “on the point of dying.”11
Carmel was a bright, sensitive young man living with his parents in a lower-middle-class section of the Bronx. He knew that he was a “freak” in the eyes of nearly everyone. He wanted independence and needed money (sometimes asking Arbus for shooting fees). His orthodox Jewish parents had immigrated to the Bronx from Israel. He once joked, “My luck, I have midget parents.”12 In one of her early photographs of the family, taken in 1960 in the Carmel’s living room, Eddie stands erect and proud, a skyscraper. Both he and his father wear dark slacks and white shirts, while the mother is in a simple dress, looking up at her son. Her look is hard to read—it could be disbelief or disgust, pride or amazement. The photograph failed to enthuse Arbus, because it caught the trio in a “normal pose.” She wanted something more unsettling.13
Ten years later, Arbus returned to the Bronx to nail down what she considered a proper portrait of Carmel and his family. She believed that the parents and son could not stand one another—and that enmity was what she should try to capture.14 The image that she chose to print was from a contact sheet with eleven other shots. Since Carmel’s initial engagement with Arbus, he had begun to sag physically and had to use a pair of canes. The parents have visibly aged; the father is more formally dressed, this time in a dark suit. The mother wears a simple, patterned dress. All but two of the images on the proof sheet are empathetic, as Eddie plants his huge hands on the shoulders of his parents, for both support and love. Another image has Carmel with his canes, flanked by his parents, neither of whom are quite looking up at him; their glance is directed elsewhere.
Arbus printed and exhibited one image of Carmel—now famous. He stands a few feet away from his parents. His mother looks up at him, with her hands behind her back, as if trying to take in the immensity (physical and emotional) of her hulking son. The father is stately, with one hand in his coat pocket, and he seems to be staring at his son’s midsection.15 It is a scene of utter pathos, disconnection, and remoteness—exactly what Arbus wanted.
Arbus’s work might be called “confessional photography,” an apt but odd designation for someone who was, in essence, taking portraits of others. But in each shot—and in the choice of which image to print—Arbus was writing herself into the images. Her work was a road map of her desires, frustrations, and fantasies. This did not mean, however, that she reduced her subjects to a whim of her imagination. When it worked best, her photography was a form of tense dialogue that blurred lines between creator and creation. As critic A. D. Coleman argued, her work “demanded her own self-revelation as the price for the self-revelation of her subject. This process is by necessity intuitive, for it cannot be systematized, dependent as it is on the constantly fluctuating state of one’s finally secret soul.”16 True enough, but, as indicated by her choice of which image of Eddie Carmel to print and display, there was a central moment in the process when the photographer chose a reality. The photographer makes an ethical choice as much as an aesthetic one. For Arbus to succeed she could not exploit her subject; she had to allow them to project their own visions of themselves onto the picture plane along with her own, hence the ultimately dialogic nature of the portraiture process.
In keeping with the New Sensibility, Arbus wanted experience, delighted in edging closer to the mad, to the mentally incapacitated, to the freaks who comported themselves with a strange yet affecting dignity, to the hope of sexual liberation, to the blurry boundaries of gender. She sought to render outsiders visible, to present their flaws as singular yet also universal in the sense that we are all, in some way, operating in that “gap between intention and effect.” “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe,” Arbus noted. It was part of what was “ironic in the world.”17 She was crossing lines, exalting in notions of liberation through sexuality and madness. In Arbus’s subject matter, intermingling of life and art, and hunger for sensation, she was part of the New Sensibility.
Arbus’s sensibility resembled Robert Frank’s in The Americans. Both were intense individuals yet capable of identifying with those perceived as outside of the complacent middle class (African Americans on Frank’s part). Arbus once remarked, “I hate the idea of composition… . I work from awkwardness.”18 This suggests an affinity with Frank, especially in terms of an unwillingness to worry about photographic mishaps, such as blurriness or aspects of the image being off kilter. But each had a different relation to their subjects. Frank was a phantom, on the periphery of the action, using a lightweight camera, barely focusing. He had nothing more than a momentary connection with his photographic subject, and the subject was often unaware of being photographed. Arbus, in contrast, with her strange amalgam of shyness and fellow feeling, especially in the presence of freaks, established relationships with her subjects, some of which lasted for years. She managed to make people who were viewed as freaks, presumably by themselves and certainly by the public, willingly sit for image after image.
Consider another image from 1970, Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room in N.Y.C. The sitter was Lauro Morales, nicknamed Cha Cha. A jaunty, confident Morales is perched atop a bed, one arm resting on the bedrail. A blanket covers most of his lower body, except for his protruding stubby toes; he is naked, save for a porkpie hat. A bottle of whiskey rests behind him on the nightstand. Morales looks straight at Arbus, his smile framed by his pencil-thin moustache. He seems comfortable with himself and the world, with his lapping chest flab and diminutive size. The image has a postcoital feel to it. In Arbus’s view, “Taking a portrait is like seducing someone.”19
Had Arbus and Morales just had sex? Her sitters, she remarked, “tend to like me. I’m extremely likeable with them.” Yet, she acknowledged, “I think I’m kind of two-faced. I’m very ingratiating. It really kind of annoys me.”20 She had first photographed Morales in 1957, when he worked at the circus, and she reconnected often with him until she caught him in that hotel room thirteen years later. What might have begun as mere curiosity had become something more. It was, as one critic argued, a case of Arbus “undercutting stable notions of identity” in order to “challenge essential categories” and “fixed meanings.” The multiplicity of possibilities in her images, argues critic Maggie Nelson, is the source of her power and the fascination of her images.21
Arbus was known to have sex sometimes with her subjects, as if capturing their image alone was insufficiently transgressive.22 She also liked to “go into people’s houses—exploring,” she said, “doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child… . I’m not vicarious—I really am involved.”23 Arbus was working on various series of photographs with sexual themes, ranging from depictions of group sex to transgendered individuals (shades of Myra Breckinridge). On one proof sheet were twelve images of a couple sitting together on a couch. The woman, white or Hispanic, is usually nude, although sometimes she wears a see-through negligee. Her partner, a black man, has his shirt off but is wearing pants. Most images show them kissing and caressing. But one image jars: a different woman enters into the picture—a naked Arbus lying upon the man’s lap. He smiles broadly and has one hand on her naked thigh. She has a wan smile on her face, registering little emotion, mostly looking exhausted.24 Arbus, then, like so many others in the New Sensibility, jumped into the sexual revolution with ardor, both as a lifestyle and as a subject matter.
In any perusal of the expanse of Arbus’s photographs, it is apparent that she had an uncanny ability to insinuate herself into the lives of others—whether it be a working-class family with children, eccentrics of all varieties, transvestites, or couples strolling in a park. As noted, she strove to ingratiate. But she also viewed herself as “like a vulture.”25 Being attractive and rail-thin made her less intimidating. One of her earliest subjects, the tattooed Jack Dracula, stated, “She had no personality whatsoever.”26
Not all warmed to Arbus, and vice versa. Perhaps the equation runs roughly as follows: the more famous or mainstream the sitter, the less enthusiastic and intimate Arbus’s encounter with them. One of Arbus’s photographs of Mailer showed him dressed in a three-piece suit, filling up a chair, hand gesturing with cigarette to make a point. Mailer’s look is wary, nearing the edge of impatience. What stands out from the photograph is how Mailer seems to be leading in an aggressive manner with his crotch.27 She got him right. “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus,” Mailer stated, was “like giving a hand grenade to a baby.”28
Commissioned to photograph and write about Mae West, the queen of camp, then seventy-one years old, Arbus traveled to Hollywood in 1964. The text was favorable: “Imperious, adorable, magnanimous, genteel and girlish, almost simultaneously.” These words, as with the photographs, could be applied with equal fervor to Arbus. But the candidness of Arbus’s camera and aesthetic was to reveal the obvious: time has taken a toll on the goddess of sex. In one image, West lounges in her opulent bed, folds of rich drapery behind, an ornate lamp beside the bed. With platinum-blond hair perched high, squinting perhaps under the weight of eyelashes elongated beyond belief, West snuggles with one of her pet monkeys. When the piece appeared in Show magazine, West’s lawyers threatened to sue, finding the pictures “unflattering, cruel, not at all glamorous.” Arbus was stunned by the reaction.29
One final example. Jump ahead to 1971. Arbus has been hired to photograph Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of the bestselling Female Eunuch. Greer had recently debated Mailer about feminism at Town Hall in New York City. The views of both were well-known and opposed, so folks got the fireworks they desired. Mailer’s newest book, The Prisoner of Sex, flayed feminism. Mailer claimed that Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto—a radical feminist screed published less than a year before its author shot Andy Warhol—was “extreme, even the extreme of the extreme,” but he proclaimed it “nonetheless a magnetic north for Women’s Lib,” proof that the movement was puritanical about sex, frustrated by failure, and hollow in feeling.30 At the sold-out Town Hall event, Mailer was onstage along with Greer; Jacqueline Ceballos, head of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women; lesbian dance critic Jill Johnston (“All women are lesbians, except those who don’t know it naturally,” and “all men are homosexuals”); and literary critic Diana Trilling. In the audience were Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, beat poet Gregory Corso, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., among other New York glitterati. At one point in the proceedings, Johnston began embracing and making out with two other women onstage. “Come on, Jill … be a lady,” Mailer admonished.31 But the debate was mostly a performance piece, full of well-whittled vituperation. At a party later, Mailer introduced his parents to Greer—and there was even some talk of Greer and Mailer debating feminism again on a television show.32
Not long after this fiasco, Arbus entered Greer’s room at the Chelsea Hotel for a photo session. Greer’s initial impression of Arbus was favorable: “She charmed me in her safari jacket and short-cropped hair.” Almost immediately, Arbus told Greer to lie down on the bed; then Arbus, too, leaped onto the bed: “[She] hung over me with this wide-angle lens staring me in the face … click-clicking away.” Greer tried to resist, not wanting such intense close-ups. If Arbus had been a man, Greer related to Arbus biographer Patricia Bosworth, “I’d have kicked her in the balls.”
The images were never used, although one can be found in the volume Diane Arbus: Magazine Work. It is a close-up, traditional and flattering, despite facial lines and minor blemishes. Greer is not lying on the bed; instead she is staring into the camera, composed and calm. Her eyes are wide, her lower lip full, with a ringed finger crossing her jaw, as if to emphasize her concentration.
What drove Arbus’s obsession to photograph those she referred to as freaks and to climb onto couches and into beds with her subjects? What explains her roaming around the city at all hours of the night seeking someone to photograph, someone to bed for the night? Why this craving for experience, this need to be on the wild side, to seek solace with the most unusual sort of folks? Was it from lack of parental love, a sense of being cossetted as a rich child, having a split identity? William Todd Schultz, in a psychological examination of Arbus’s inner life, admits that it remains a mystery. Her famous line about photographs being “a secret about a secret” obtains. She was that secret within a secret.33
With the mysterious Ms. Arbus, perhaps, it is best to adopt a stance of anti-interpretation, to avoid trying to drain the deep waters of her self-evidently troubled psyche for explanations. Arbus was obviously driven to be among the odd and to record them, usually empathetically. In her life and images she demonstrated, whenever opportunity allowed, a will to transgress. For all of her identification with her subjects, she did not shirk from capturing their otherness, which made viewers uncomfortable. As photographer Sylvia Plachy recalled, “Arbus’s pictures frightened me when I met them.”34
There is a passage in Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding (1943) where the deeply confused adolescent character Frankie goes to a circus sideshow and sees a “morphidite,” a “Half-Man Half-Woman.” Although she is struck by the person “divided completely in half,” one side clothed in “leopard skin,” the other in “brassiere and spangled skirt,” it is the eyes of the person that haunt Frankie, who was “afraid of the long Freak eyes.”35 Frankie’s response, a mixture of fascination and horror, was no doubt a common response to freaks. But Arbus, with her close-ups and flash, managed to look straight into and behind the eyes, perhaps not only to capture their soul but to reveal her own.
Arbus, like Warhol and Vidal, was fascinated with the idea that “genders are in flux.” She took many powerful images of transvestites and drag queens over the years.36 Sometimes the images were tame, almost dainty. At other times, they were harsh and depressing. In Transvestite at a Drag Ball (1970), a fellow wears a sagging negligee, revealing drooping chest flab. He is bedecked with cheap pearls and costume jewelry, with a wig and feather hat atop his head. His pancaked face, with outsized features, reveals a person seemingly deflated with life.37
A Naked Man Being a Woman (1968) offers a different man, his face made up, posing provocatively with his penis tucked between his legs.38 Behind him is the ubiquitous bed, sheets messy, the floor littered with refuse and a beer can. But he is regal in his pride. In a third image, taken in 1967, a young man lounges on a leather chair, wearing a bra, panties, and women’s dress shoes. He too hides his penis by crossing one leg over the other. He stares, almost blankly, at the camera, his face neatly composed and attractive—again, a young man comfortable with the shedding or mixing of identity. These are three images of similar subjects, but each is endowed with different emotional registers. Arbus was drawn to the otherness of transvestites, but she recognized the plurality of their experiences. Neither a cheerleader nor a critic, she accepted their essential humanity, which society clearly rejected—and that was a breakthrough.
On a trip to Maryland in 1970, Arbus took various shots of circus performers. One presents an overweight young woman in a sort of bikini. The aesthetic allure of the image comes mainly from how the wind billows in contrasting ways the woman’s white cape and the dark circus tent behind her. The woman looks supremely comfortable; this is her world and Arbus respects that.39 Another shot from that trip, Albino Sword Swallower with Her Sister, captures the similarity of their coloring and hair (Arbus took many images over the years of twins). The wind pushes one sister’s hair while the other’s remains in place. One wears normal regalia, the other some sort of costume. Sameness within difference.40 Hermaphrodite and a Dog in Carnival Trailer evokes both the mundane and the strange. The dog’s head rests on the hermaphrodite’s hairy “male” leg. This person, like the other circus performers and transvestites, bears an obviously divided identity but without apparent apprehension. The look on the poser’s face can only be described as serene.41
The sexual revolution engaged Arbus as both voyeur and participant. She was also willing to follow the subject matter into places hitherto kept from plain sight—into the world of sadomasochism and bondage. As with all of her work, it reveals much ambiguity, neither a simple celebration nor a condemnation, but a coming to terms with the experience, no more, no less. Dominatrix with a Kneeling Client, N.Y.C. (1970) shows the dominatrix standing erect, exuding power, a muscular torso contained in an outfit of bustier, black fish-net stockings, and knee-length black leather boots. She looks straight at the camera and seems to be holding a riding crop pushed flush against her client’s naked butt. He wears nothing other than long socks; while his head is indistinct, it appears that he is kissing one of her boots. It is all about power and submission. But in another image, Dominatrix Embracing Her Client (1970), we have a different emotional tone. The middle-aged client, still naked but for his socks, is now upright. But he and the dominatrix are hugging, more out of affection or recognition of one another than sexual heat. Tender without a hint of sentimentality.42
By 1968 Arbus was scattered and a mess. She had been hospitalized that summer for hepatitis—her “romance with death,” in her words. While recuperation proved slow, she was flush with ideas for new photographic series: returned runaways, criminals, people who have had plastic surgery, beauty queens, elderly twins, families, singles going to the Catskills to meet other singles, and much more. At times she felt scared, depressed, and “paranoid and besieged.”43
Out of this wealth of pictorial possibilities one emerged. In June 1968, she wrote, “Someone is getting me permission they swear, from someone at the head of the New Jersey prisons and mental hospitals to photograph in them, just for me.”44 The bureaucratic wheels turned slowly, but Arbus was busy with commercial assignments. Yet, she acknowledged, “I would like to photograph mentally retarded people, idiots, imbeciles (morons are the smartest of the three). Especially the cheerful ones.” Today, Arbus’s words seem joltingly insensitive. She began at this time to look into literature on madness, reading psychiatrist R. D. Laing, with his disdain for divisions between the sane and the insane. Laing, she wrote, “seems so extraordinary in his empathy for madness that it suddenly seemed like he would be the most terrific guide.” She wanted to examine a world that had been, in a sense, closed off from public view, and to do so with sympathy rather than exploitation of difference.45
Permission to photograph at the Vineland mental health facility in New Jersey finally came in the summer of 1969. Writing to her daughter Amy, Arbus was exultant and voluble, as she described her subjects at the mental institution: “Some of them are perfectly rational, but simple and tend to repeat things. One lady said, ‘Oh God,’ every time she saw me. ‘You’re cute,’ she’d say… . Could say more but those are the things she kept wanting to say over and over. And many of them just love to hug.”46
Early in the project, which would continue into 1971, Arbus was enraptured: “I took the most terrific pictures.” Arbus regularly quoted the odd and cute statements made by residents at the institution. A new book, she imagined, might emerge: “I could do it in a year… . It’s the first time Ive [sic] encountered a subject where the multiplicity is the thing. I mean I am not just looking for the best picture of them.” And she was excited about writing the text for the volume—“I ought to be able to write it because I really adore them.”47
Some analysts have suggested that the series frustrated Arbus. In this view, she was stymied in her attempt to connect with her subjects; they were “absorbed” in their own worlds—largely oblivious to Arbus and the camera. Furthermore, she could not identify with these subjects by participating in their world.48 This is balderdash. Many of her subjects were extremely engaged with Arbus, and she with them. They were no more “absorbed” in their world than Jack Dracula with his torrent of tattoos. The connection between her and her subjects at Vineland was intense and often delightful. But, as with all of her work, she was transgressive, working to capture “things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”49
The series shared many of the signature aspects of Arbus’s earlier work. She had again entered another world, one that had been shuttered to most in society. Some of the individuals were photographed in their beds—“Barbara is sweet and bright and modest. When I did her in bed in her flowered nightgown she lowered her eyes before raising them.”50 But many of the best images—at once revealing and disquieting—were shot outdoors. And, in typical fashion, Arbus liked to pair individuals.
In one image (all were untitled) we see two young people with Down syndrome in a field, a wooded area in the background. Both are chubby and happy—taking in the breeze, smiling. Another has three women playing in the grass; one is doing some sort of acrobatic move, hiding her face. The two behind her are contrasts: one studies the acrobat while the other looks at the sky, a huge smile visible. They are just plain having fun. Other images were taken during a Halloween celebration—the perfect bewildering moment for Arbus. These images, however, are not scary; they are, as Arbus noted, “so lyric and tender and pretty.”51 A young woman in one image looks straight at the camera; in one hand she has a Styrofoam cup; her other hand holds onto her party hat. There is the same wooded background as in the earlier image, although a wandering piece of trash undermines the utopian potential for the image. In another photograph from the series, a single individual stands in that open field; their gender is indeterminate; they are covered with a white sheet and wearing a mask—and they are aligned with a nicely cast shadow.
Still another image depicts four individuals with Halloween outfits and various masks. They could be anyone’s kids decked out for the holiday. A central goal of Arbus’s work, especially with her celebrity photographs, was to strip away masks. With freaks and the mentally impaired, in contrast, she appreciated the masks, both literally and figuratively.52 Wearing masks made the people at Vineland normal. In this picture, despite their scary masks, they seem less disoriented than the subjects of many of her images of so-called normal individuals, ranging from girls at fat camp, to a demented-looking kid with a toy grenade, to a pro–Vietnam War demonstrator.
Sontag hated Arbus’s images of freaks. Writing about Arbus in the early 1970s, Sontag unleashed an attack that was impassioned and over the edge—not to mention surprising. After all, both had celebrated experience, opening themselves to a pluralistic aesthetic and sensibility. Sontag had shown familiarity with the world of transvestites and oddness in her essay on Flaming Creatures and in her discussion of camp. Arbus’s world, then, was hardly alien territory, at least in its subject matter, for Sontag.
But Sontag and the world had changed by 1970. The war in Vietnam had not ended; in fact, it had expanded into Cambodia and Laos. Protests at home had engulfed college campuses, leading to the slaughter of students at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. The social fabric of liberalism was tearing. The liberation potential of rock culture, too, was spinning into disarray. By the end of the year both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix would be dead from drug overdoses. The 1960s, Sontag wrote, was “the decade in which freaks went public and became a safe, approved subject in art,” albeit one with troubling ethical implications for viewers. She no longer had patience for artists such as Warhol, whose “twin poles of boringness and freakishness” now seemed only to contribute to the decadence and disaster of the late 1960s and early 1970s.53
In fierce prose, Sontag condemned Arbus’s “venturing into the world to collect images that are painful.” Arbus had only two stylistic approaches to her subjects—presenting them either in “deadpan” fashion or with “relish.” Neither approach allowed viewers to feel empathy for freaks.54 Her images transformed difference into sameness: “Anybody Arbus photographed was a freak” (34–35). Arbus was guilty of “lowering the threshold of what is terrible.” At the core of her overall argument, Sontag dismissed Arbus for making “history and politics irrelevant … by atomizing it into horror” (32–33).
The attack was personal at times: Arbus was revolting against her privileged background by entering a world of freaks; she turned to them in order to “vent her frustration at being safe” (43). Arbus was also fitted into Sontag’s general diatribe against photography and the power of the camera: “Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive… . There is still something predatory in the act of taking a picture … a sublimated murder, a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time” (14). Finally, why didn’t Arbus have the guts to confront particular horrors of the historical moment: “Thalidomide babies or napalm victims” (42)?
By the time Sontag’s diatribe against Arbus and photography had appeared, Arbus had committed suicide. Unlike Sexton’s, it was a suicide unforetold, but it too was unsurprising. Too much interpretive license is required to argue that Arbus’s long association with freaks pushed her into the abyss. One might just as validly claim that her experience with and passion for freaks kept her going as long as she did.
Was Arbus guilty of the sins Sontag accused her of? In bringing freaks into the public view she could claim that, rather than weakening the spectator’s empathy and understanding, she had made them more attuned to difference. In the end, as with all artists, Arbus had written her personal vision on freaks as much as she had done on the straight world. She certainly demonstrated more empathy with freaks than with her commercial subjects or middle-class sitters. In the images of those in a mental institution, she revealed their shared sense of community as they engaged in play, affection, and life together.55
Thirty years later, Sontag returned to the issue, although not specifically to her judgments concerning Arbus’s work. She admitted that she had a “quarrel” with her earlier views. Images of pain, or of freaks, might not “shrivel sympathy.” While we lived in a world where reality had become a spectacle, the value of “atrocious images” was that they might “haunt” us, pushing us—as political theorist Hannah Arendt had once demanded—to think, to reflect, and “to pay attention.” A powerful and necessary imperative, one that Arbus’s images had done much to encourage.56
In 1972 there was a large retrospective of Arbus’s work (125 pieces) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It brought awareness of many images long shunted to the periphery. As always, some shuddered in the glare of Arbus’s subjects. Others viewed her subjects with new insight and greater appreciation. Art critic Hilton Kramer remarked at the time that Arbus had been central to the development of a “new aesthetic attitude”—marked by “radical candor and an extraordinary sympathy.” Kramer may have overstated the prevalence of sympathy in her work—at least in terms of how she depicted “normals.” But such antagonism to bourgeois culture, to the sanctity of middle-class values, and her openness to difference and experience placed her in the ranks of those establishing the New Sensibility. After a stint at MOMA, her show traveled around the United States and other nations, eventually attracting seven million viewers.57