Diane Arbus Research Articles

The smugness of privilege

AbstractThis essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as “ugly,” is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological project and a representational practice. Like Arbus's photographs, anthropology is good for subverting the privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who are prepared to contemplate “ugly” people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives.

Gender and Migration: Resisting with a Camera. A Researcher to Researcher Experience

This manuscript is a reflexive collaboration between two differently situated researchers. It meets at the crossroad of knowledge and visual activism at three levels: it uses a case study to analyze the possibilities of photovoice as a form of resistance against narratives of hate; it reflects on the ways in which the observed and the observer cooperate to construct from their own perspectives a legitimized knowledge aiming to promote visibility and social transformation; finally, it revises whether photovoice may become a form of visual activism and, if so, the ways in which images may be used toward this goal. Using as a point of departure the work of the photographer Diane Arbus and a photovoice project on being a migrant woman in Spain, the authors elaborate on the power of images to work at the margins, from the margins, and for the margins.

Social Distance: Intimacy, the Uncanny, and Extimacy in the Photographs of Diane Arbus

In a time of worldwide viral pandemic, the work of the American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–71) is pertinent for its ability to remind us that what we think is normal is not normal, that psychological darkness is part of the life balance, and that while close contact can be pleasurable, it can also be extremely uncomfortable, if not fearful. The essay prioritizes the audience’s psychological position in the reading of Arbus’s Untitled photographs made between 1969 and 1971, through using Jacques Lacan’s concept of extimacy. The Untitled work seems to embody Lacan’s concept of extimacy, which provides new insights into the photographs and addresses the lesser-understood psychological rifts created by these iconoclastic works. These psychological perspectives also reflect the extimate nature of our relationships in the current pandemic and contest the centrality of Arbus’s biography in most critiques of her work.

Melanie Klein and Diane Arbus Through the Lens of the Relational Image Portrait of a Life: Melanie Klein and the Artists. By RogerAmos. London: Phoenix Publishing, 2019, xviv + 133 pp., $35.00 hardcover. Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer. By LubowArthur. New York: Harper Collins, 2016, xviii + 734 pp., $35.00 hardcover, $17.99 paperback.

Melanie Klein and Diane Arbus Through the Lens of the Relational Image Portrait of a Life: Melanie Klein and the Artists. By RogerAmos. London: Phoenix Publishing, 2019, xviv + 133 pp., $35.00 hardcover. Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer. By LubowArthur. New York: Harper Collins, 2016, xviii + 734 pp., $35.00 hardcover, $17.99 paperback.

„Wybór twarzy” − spotkanie Federica Felliniego i Diane Arbus w świetle semantycznych wizji ludzkich fizjonomii

This research focuses on two famous artists born in the 20s of the 20th century who have been rarely brought together in comparison. It’s quite astonishing, as – putting aside the discrepancy of their respective biographies – the landscapes made of human faces in their oeuvre have much in common both aesthetically and semantically. As Fellini said in one of his interviews, “I look for my movies in all of the faces that are surrounding me”. The eponymous “selection of faces” was the most important part of the movie castings for the director from Rimini. He was eager to behold all of his upcoming films “in the appearing faces”. Proceeding from face semiology, the etymology of an Ancient Greek πρόσωπον meaning concurrently a “person” and a “mask”, and the problem of mimesis, this paper attempts to analyze the affinity of human physiognomies seen in the movies of Frederico Fellini and in the photographic portraits taken by Diane Arbus. The key to understanding their relatedness seems to be an explicit objection against “democracy of faces”, a withdrawal from staging the human visage to make it more expressive and unconstrained, and the conviction that “a face is not in the camera,” but it resides in the creator’s mind initially.

The possibilities and impossibilities of treating acromegaly 50 years ago illustrated by the Diane Arbus photograph, A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970.

SummaryThe iconic photograph ‘A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970’ by the famous American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) shows the 2.34 m (7 ft. 8¼ in.) acromegalic giant Eddie Carmel (1936–1972) and his parents in the living room of their New York home. The picture is a typical example of Arbus’ style. The relationship between the artist and the tall subject is described. A growth hormone-secreting pituitary macroadenoma was unsuccessfully treated with two cycles of pituitary radiotherapy achieving a 7000 rad cumulative dose and by incomplete pituitary surgery. Hypopituitarism was treated according to medical standards in the 1960s and 1970s. The giant patient died of increased intracranial pressure and at autopsy a residual acidophil pituitary macroadenoma was found, but also a perisellar meningioma which was most probably induced by the high dose of pituitary radiotherapy. The case report illustrates the possibilities and impossibilities of treating acromegaly 50 years ago and demonstrates the potential risks of high dose pituitary radiotherapy (in acromegaly).Learning pointsAcromegaly is a very old disease.Therapy for acromegaly has evolved over the decades.In art museums one can come across artistic impressions of endocrine disorders.People suffering from disfiguring endocrine disorders like acromegaly were pre-WW2 ‘exposed’ in theaters and circuses.High dose pituitary radiotherapy can be associated with secondary brain tumor formation.

Contributors

Contributors

“Un congegno che capta ogni cosa”. Susan Sontag e i limiti dell’immaginario fotografico

“A device that captures it all”. Susan Sontag and the limits of photographic imaginary. Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography (1977) identifies the photographic gaze as a way of experiencing and defining reality through a controversial mix of fragmentation and desire of totalization, which is typical of capitalistic societies. Different visual languages of the global modernity show that our perception of reality is constructed by giving us an immense amount of visual experience. If post-Fordist culture has reinforced an addictive attitude towards the production-consumption of images, we can nonetheless recognize and empower our capability to assign them unforeseen meanings, for instance through processes of cognitive estrangement. The final part of this article compares Sontag’s perspective on the photographic construction of reality to Mark Fisher’s notion of “capitalist realism”. By doing this, I explore the possibility of a critical kind of photographic conscience, based on the weird effects of experiencing reality through the filter of a camera, which is particularly evident in Diane Arbus’ body of works.

THE WORLD OF DIANE ARBUS: A MODEL OF THE OUTSTANDING ARTIST’S PSYCHOLOGICAL PORTRAIT

The article author analyzes the factors not only related to Diane Arbus’ formation as an outstanding personality, but also determining the originality of her works. To create Diane Arbus’ psychological characteristics, her biography, autobiographical notes, interviews and other sources were analyzed. The following methods were used: comparison, to compare various data and thoughts about Diane’s personality traits; generalization, to determine the general trend in the artist’s psychological characteristics; and synthesis, to create a model of the photographer’s psychological porter. Diane Arbus’ works can be described by the following qualities: singularity, originality and extremely strong emotionality. The question was also raised whether Diane’s works offended people depicted on them, and whether her photographs were socially correct. Among the leading social factors that influenced Diana’s personality and work, it is necessary examine her close social environment, family, traumatic childhood events and the determining influence of Diane’s teacher - Lisette Model, who revealed Arbus’s creative potential. The article author also investigated the influence of wider social environment, namely, socially significant events: world wars, protests, high-profile political murders, cultural movements, and so on. However, our study has showed that socio-economic or political events had minimal influence on Diane’s personality. Thus, the photographer had such personal trait as resistance to social unrest. The artist’s psychological portrait includes two distinct groups of traits: general, having an impact on Diane’s life, and special, directly related to the specifics of the photographer’s work. Her general features were, in particular: deep introversion, increased emotional sensitivity and anxiety. The article concludes that the choice by Diane Arbus of themes for her works was significantly influenced by traumatic experience of her childhood, as well as empathy, as her permanent personal trait.

Le monde horizontal by Bruno Remaury

Reviewed by: Le monde horizontal by Bruno Remaury Alain Ranwez Remaury, Bruno. Le monde horizontal. José Corti, 2019. ISBN 978-2-7143-1225-9. Pp. 176. Traversing from one historical age to another and interlacing both fictional and historical characters make this unique novel, or chronicle as some would label it, a truly intriguing and challenging read. As the title would indicate, the subject deals with the horizontal world which must then be compared to its alternative, the vertical one. It is 1906, and Félix Régnault discovers the negative hands in the Gargas grottos in the Pyrénées. While pondering his discovery he concludes that the hands, aimed upward, are destined to represent the birth of the sacred. This vertical world is quickly interspersed with a disastrous event when over a thousand miners were killed in Courrières, also in 1906. Both events evoke the awe of fear and the sacred. The novel continues to intertwine stories of one Marie whose bourgeois status gives her feelings of anxiety living above ground. The reader is then transported to a cavernous chateau in 1506, where Francisco, an intern to his master Leonardo de Vinci, recounts his master's fear and obsession with the minacious inner rocky grottos and water. Fear of worldwide flood becomes the major fear of the populace at that time, and floods do create vast liquid plains in the Pô region: "Pour Léonard, la fluidité de l'eau est le recouvrement et l'aplanissement du monde" (91). The liquid plains now become the vast plains of America, and Remaury focuses on the horizontal, which does not necessarily mean for the better. It is 1946, the skyline weighing heavily becomes the motif of expansion, and the development of the Greyhound bus line crisscrossing its new and vast pattern consecrates this new geography. Geography, asserts the author, is the first mythology of America: "L'Amérique se mesure à l'aune de sa démesure. Elle est comme le dit Camus la civilisation même de l'espace et de la quantité" (116–17). Everything becomes horizon and it is in the confines of this horizon that one [End Page 266] Issac Woodward becomes the victim of racism. Still 1946, and Jackson Pollock places his large canvas on the floor and paints while walking around it and destroying the horizon. He then places several traces of his hand in the upper corner. Pollock's gesture opposes the artist of the negative hands by turning his back to the skies, and Pollock's taste for large spaces emphasizes his wish to present a space without borders, the infinite. The vertical man was the center of the world, stars above turned around him while the horizontal man is at a crossroad, but it might just be in this ever-expanding horizontal world that the vertical man is still respected. All the images depicted in the novel: hands, plains, mines, Marie, Diane Arbus, et al., intersect with each other, albeit in different worlds. But the interpretation or meaning of this enchanting work remains, however, in the reader's creative imaging. Alain Ranwez Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Trophy Hunter: Ulrich Seidl’s Portraits and Safari

Abstract The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl often films interview subjects as though they were posing for portrait photographs, and Seidl maintains that one of his major influences is the photographer Diane Arbus. This article examines how this high level of control over a film’s frames reveals strategies central to his filmmaking and especially to his documentary films. Seidl is particularly concerned with depicting his subjects’ complicity in the exploitation of labor, as seen in Safari (2016), a film about Austrians who travel to Namibia to hunt and collect trophies. Seidl presents viewers with unforgiving portraits of Austrian tourists, as he employs nearly every one of his trademark techniques to highlight the many contradictions behind his subjects’ perspectives.

Unsettling appearances: Diane Arbus, Erving Goffman and the sociological eye

Both the photographer Diane Arbus and sociologist Erving Goffman were fascinated by the way we present ourselves to others and this article sets out how each understood the drama of human interaction. It begins by exploring how their work parallels some developments in the sociology of deviance, and notes how Goffman was one of the earliest critics of this field, before briefly sketching out Arbus’s controversial career and then turning to a more detailed look at three of her images. It concentrates on how the gap between intention and effect, or what Goffman terms the difference between the impressions we ‘give’ and those we actually ‘give off’, are at the core of her work and this sociological insight animates her compositions. The article then describes how their work unsettles ‘normal appearances’ and provides rich resources for understanding human conduct.

Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson

Reviewed by: Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson Hannah Shea (bio) Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 174 pp. Deborah Nelson's Tough Enough presents for study Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil. She brings these women together on the basis of their similar styles of writing and thinking about suffering. At some point, each of them has been called "unsentimental" by a reviewer, a term that confers praise for resisting emotion; an unsentimental writer might also be called "clear-eyed," "refreshing," or "unflinching." (Full disclosure: It was in Nelson's course on 20th-century literature and culture at the University of Chicago that I first encountered most of these women.) Their attributes call to mind a whole list of women working around the same time, including Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Flannery O'Connor, as well as writers of our own time––Rachel Cusk, whose most recent novels Outline and Transit have received such praise as "lethally intelligent" and "hazardously penetrating." Nelson points out that unsentimentality is a value more associated with personality or character than with philosophy or strategy. Considering unsentimentality as a strategy for dealing with pain and suffering rather than just a prose style, Nelson reveals a similar ethic in the work of these women and draws them together in a serious philosophical study rather than personality-focused portraits. Instead of writing toward an overarching theory, Nelson rebuilds her argument six times, arriving at six distinct, though related, ideas about "facing reality" without resorting to the comforts of empathy or strong feeling. Her distillation of ethic from aesthetic, using historical context for evaporating agent, is thrilling to observe and does great credit to the works she considers. How to confront and represent the painfulness of suffering, especially on a large social scale, a scale which, at the time these six were writing, had just been exploded by the Holocaust? Not to ignore suffering, but to approach it most effectively, without succumbing to emotion, which supplants it. Not to relieve pain, but, by facing it, to allow it to change minds and actions. As Nelson defines unsentimental work, it "prizes the object of reflection over feelings about that object." Emotion, then, curtains reality, and we can choose to feel the warmth of the sun through it or, moving the curtains aside, face the light of day. However, the window is not a window but a photograph, painting, or block of prose––facts accrue power through composition––and these women were (are, in Didion's case) crafters of prose and photographs as well as prominent intellectuals. [End Page 339] Nelson implicitly argues that style itself can be more than a superficial quality of art. Says Nelson about Didion's self-mandated prose style, "The inability to tolerate one's own pain––that is, to 'control' one's own self-pity––begins the slippery slide from moral softness to stylistic sloppiness to self-delusion. To 'impose' that self-delusion, rooted in self-pity, on others in the act of writing is, for Didion, a violation of the writer's public trust." In this account, style guards between "moral sloppiness" and "self-delusion." And style, being vulnerable to influence, must itself be guarded vigilantly. Each time pen meets paper or a finger releases a shutter, the writer or photographer's resolve is tested and reinforced. Though Nelson doesn't extend her arguments into our contemporary political context, except to say that we live in a "paradise of facts" and yet "the problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge," she could have. But she didn't have to. Any politically aware reader could clutter the margins of this book with––pithy, I'm sure––commentary for our times. Once again, emotion dominates political discourse. On any given day an article appears about liberal snowflakes, handwringers, or heart-bleeders, and, the next, about conservatives at the mercy of their emotions, motivated by insecurity, blinded by religion. Reality and all its facts––war, racism, xenophobia, natural disaster––goes on in the background, heavily curtained. As we've seen...

Carnets de l'incarnation: Textes choisis 2002–2015 by Nancy Huston

Reviewed by: Carnets de l'incarnation: Textes choisis 2002–2015 by Nancy Huston Polly Galis Nancy Huston, Carnets de l'incarnation: Textes choisis 2002–2015. Arles: Actes Sud, 2016. Huston's corpus is commonly characterised by its transnational and multi-generic format, and Carnets de l'incarnation is no exception. Huston draws inspiration from multiple contexts including a research trip to Israel, a gallery in Beijing, a New York book-club, and the Parisian Hebdo polemic surrounding the 2015 terrorist attacks. She also incorporates both public pieces (newspaper articles, critical prefaces, conference proceedings) and personal fragments (diary entries, poetry, and prose), playing with narrative style and shifting from the comic to the tragic. Huston pays homage to a wide spectrum of philosophers, artists, and writers, including Diane Arbus, Anaïs Nin, Nelly Arcan, Kate Chopin, Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Annie Leclerc and Romain Gary, on whom she has written extensively in two eponymous publications. As with her previous amalgamated textes choisis, Désirs et Réalités (1995) and Âmes et corps (2004), Huston brings together a decade's worth of foundational essays centred on an overarching theme: in the case of Carnets de l'incarnation, a gendered mind-body dichotomy. Huston begins by acknowledging problems experienced primarily by women: prostitution and pornography; the Madonna-whore complex; and the reduction of women's identity to their bodily form (be they de- or hyper-sexualised). Huston then addresses male-orientated issues, [End Page 141] namely, men's coercion into violent and dominant social positions, and their implication in paedophilia, crime, and war. Huston situates these analyses at the intersection of biological determinism and social constructionism. On the one hand, Huston claims men have a naturally higher libido than women, and that women are predetermined to solicit the male gaze. On the other, Huston considers instincts to be dangerously distorted by social phenomena such as the sex industry, which exploits men's sexual drives and women's bodies to finance a neo-liberal market. Huston thus highlights the hypocrisy of our contemporary epoch which both denies sexual difference and profits from it. Where women are encouraged to define themselves according to their bodies, moreover, men are paradoxically taught to deny theirs. Huston insists that we should not overlook but learn from sexual difference, to harness its positive potential instead. What could be interpreted as a contradiction thus constitutes an invitation to overcome binaries. The same is true for other dualisms in this collection, as with love-intellect, nihilism-idealism, corporeality-spirituality. As Huston confirms in her introduction, she seeks not coherence but polyphony, and invites us to embrace our material corporeality—men and women alike—to access a mode of spirituality fitting for our modern times. How this spiritual state is to be achieved in practical terms, however, is left unanswered, and the book ends with a fictional tale of disempowerment: the narrator espies an approaching army and is unable to forfend its advance. In true Huston style, this collection refuses neat categorisation and simple solutions. If any conclusive messages do stand out, it is that we can problematize cultural, racial, and gender divides by imagining the position of the Other, and that we must re-evaluate the causes and consequences of gendered bodily experience before it is too late. [End Page 142] Polly Galis University of Leeds Copyright © 2018 L'Esprit Créateur

Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New SensibilityThe Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New SensibilityThe Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

A Revolutionary Promise of Justice: Diane Arbus’ Self-Portrait, Pregnant, 1945, NYC

My critical musings on this little-known maternal self-portrait are meant to reconceive its meaning as an uncanny predecessor to contemporary feminist embodied knowledge. This knowledge holds the potential for articulating new strategies of respect for the maternal and for the real mother, in other words for thinking m(o)therwise. This portent photograph not only presented a non-normative concept of pregnancy during its cultural moment; it continues to challenge the deep patriarchal “embarrassment” that pregnancy carries. Arbus’ performance of the maternal was crafted within her creative practice and deeply embedded within a new maternal structure of projected work and self. Picturing herself as artist/photographer, other, lover and projected mother, she embodies a creative interplay between the passion of theory and the thinking body. <p class="p1">This photograph can be viewed at <a href="https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/photographs-diane-arbus/self-portrait-pregnant-n-y-c-1945-1/222">https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/photographs-diane-arbus/self-portrait-pregnant-n-y-c-1945-1/222.</a>

レトリックとしての写真の枠組 : ダイアン・アーバスのポートレートから(第 52 回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

レトリックとしての写真の枠組 : ダイアン・アーバスのポートレートから(第 52 回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Invisibilidades cruzadas: uma aproximação ao conceito de o momento decisivo de Henri Cartier-Bresson

Este artigo analisa o que se pode conceber como o conceito de o momento decisivo de Henri Cartier-Bresson, tendo em vista a proliferação de interpretações que as palavras “momento decisivo” guardam em relação ao conceito cunhado por ele. Para investigar a raiz desse conceito analisam-se algumas de suas fotos em referência a outras imagens da história da arte, como o casal Arnolfini, de Van Eyck, a natureza morta, de Willen Kalf, e as pinturas de Vermeer, além das fotografias de Diane Arbus.

Review: Diane Arbus: In the Beginning

Book Review| January 01 2017 Review: Diane Arbus: In the Beginning Diane Arbus: In the Beginning MET BREUER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ARTNEW YORK CITY JULY 12–NOVEMBER 27, 2016 Wendy Horwitz Wendy Horwitz WENDY HORWITZ teaches at Pennsylvania State University at Abington and in the Narrative Medicine Program at the Stanley Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2017) 44 (4): 36–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2017.44.4.36 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Wendy Horwitz; Review: Diane Arbus: In the Beginning. Afterimage 1 January 2017; 44 (4): 36–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2017.44.4.36 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Looking at Difference

The article argues that disability is a resource for revitalizing the practice of portraiture. Drawing on Tobin Siebers’s work on disability aesthetics and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work on staring, the article explores how disability inflects and redefines the conventions of portraiture and how contemporary portraiture revises the photographic history of disability, a history rooted in the medicalization or enfreakment of bodily difference. After briefly surveying the history of photographic representations of variant bodies, consideration is given to the work of Diane Arbus, whose portraits continue to shape the representation of disability, and then to the work of contemporary photographer Laura Swanson, who positions her work in relation to that of Arbus. Swanson reimagines the portrait by resisting the viewer’s gaze and confronting viewers with their expectations of portraiture, their histories of looking, and their encounters with disability and difference.