Spectacle and Dehumanisation in Diane Arbus’s Freak Photography and ‘Untitled Series (1970-71)’

Duplicity and ambivalence create disparity between Diane Arbus’s photographic works and her writing. Arbus was privy to the “netherworld” in which she operated because she inserted herself into it; her family background of wealth, artistry and private education does not implicate her in the world of her own practice. She was other to society’s others and the society she was born into (Arbus felt ostracised, had famously low self-worth and depressive episodes[1]). Patricia Bosworth’s naïve biography implies that Arbus’s ability to relate to being other gave her licence to capture the marginalised in such a stark and unforgiving way. But crucially, Arbus separated herself from, and was socially above, the people she captured. The societal attitude to the disabled and their treatment, and the discourse around the “abnormal” (in this instance anyone who was not heteronormative and physically typical) was completely different to our contemporary understanding of what is acceptable, and Diane Arbus was working within these societal constraints, not the contemporary world of heightened social awareness.

However, her approach to her subjects and the nature of her intention and their representation is problematic in today’s contemporary context, and was still exploitative in that context. Much of Arbus’s description of her work and ideology implies that the camera, as a “necessarily cruel”[2] medium, exempted her from traditional taboos, but this Nixonesque excuse of exemption because of position is not strong enough. Her claim that the camera “annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed”[3] is self-delusory and lacks any real justification. It offers explanation for exploitative undercurrent that pervades Arbus’s work, but cannot excuse it. Germaine Greer, one of Arbus’s subjects, describes the problematic nature of Arbus’s photography in terms of dehumanisation and morality:

To say that Arbus's creativity was driven by disgust is not to dismiss her as an artist. It is a curiously moralistic view of art that says it cannot be generated by negative emotion. Good haters can make good art, but their despair and indignation ought to be called forth by something more sinister than mere human imperfection and self-delusion. Arbus is not an artist who makes us see the world anew; she embeds us in our own limitations, our lack of empathy, our kneejerk reactions, our incuriosity and lack of concern.[4]

There is no denying the skill and artistry of Arbus’s photography and the significance of the relationship of her technique in relation to the discourse of the Barthesian punctum[5], as discussed by Carol Armstrong. Her confrontational approach – the questionable binary of the black and white image; her deadpan use of frontality; having the subject stare back at her; using the square portrait against the rectangularity of the book or magazine to emphasise the misfit quality of the bodies being photographed – provides an insight into her strategy of photography and its provocativeness. But instead of democratising the body, her photography exacerbates its failures “while aggrandizing [her] own narcissistically pessimistic view of the world.”[6]

Many, including Susan Sontag, consider Arbus’s posthumous 1972 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art to be a response to Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition. The universal humanising of international families and cultures through identification of similarities was the intention of Family of Man; Arbus’s intention was individuate and dehumanise collective society through iteration of biological “flaw”, which was mostly represented through photographs of the mentally or physically vulnerable. This unforgiving treatment was not exclusive to the marginalised, as Arbus photographed the wealthy and so-called normal in such a way as to identify their flaws too. But exploiting everyone does not excuse the exploitation of the vulnerable, and it is that kind of discourse that allows for the disabled and “abnormal” to be dehumanised and viewed as spectacle in an essentially normal middle-class environment. Although society’s freaks were becoming popularised and behaviours considered freakish were being celebrated in the 1960s and ‘70s, the body and the grotesque are not being democratised by Arbus. Her response to her subjects is a reaction to alienation that is essentially anti-humanist: it is one that measures freakishness against humanity and makes the least unusual people seem failed and the most unusual people seem monstrous.

In Sontag’s essay ‘America as seen through Photographs, Darkly’ she recalls Arbus’s treatment of the “freaks” in such a way that reveals Arbus’s attitudes to the subjects as being one of adoration[7] tempered with some kind of respect, but ultimately one of voyeurism. It also identifies her treatment of them as what Feuer refers to as “a means to an end”[8], essentially her dehumanisation of the disabled through her objectification of them. The mythologizing of Diane Arbus as someone who sat the subjects down and calmed them does not mean she was not exploitative. Any photographer or investigative journalist has to manipulate the subject to suit their intention. Diane Arbus’s supposed intimacy with her subject was based on her claim that they shared secrets[9] with her – an act without the reciprocity that qualifies friendship – and the implicit cooperation derived from their posing and confrontation of the camera. This “friendship” is both irrelevant and insincere when the final product is examined. As Sontag writes, they visibly do not understand that they are to be exhibited as “freaks”. Christoph Ribbat writes about her “freak” subjects: “even though we can sense a certain respect for them in her notes, her photographs do not give much of that respect away.”[10]  In the example of ‘Patriotic young man with flag’ (1967, black and white photograph, New York City) Arbus captures a man who is either not of sound mind, or who Arbus wants to represent as being mentally ill because of his patriotism. However misinformed about America’s turbulent political situation in 1967 this man is, the gormlessness and strangeness with which he has been presented is mocking to say the least, and at worst exploitative. The uneasy expression on the face of the ‘Woman with her baby monkey’ (1971, black and white photograph, New Jersey) and the off-kilter composition, the crookedness of the blinds and the blanket she sits on criticise the weirdness of a situation that obviously involves a mentally unbalanced woman in a privatised situation; a situation that Arbus makes into public spectacle. Here, the ambivalence or duplicity of Diane Arbus becomes clear; since she presents the Other as something she is attuned to in her writing but represents it in photography with all the trappings of the grotesque. Her intention, supposedly, is to represent the marginalised and involve them in the same narrative as the social mainstream by identifying everyone in that narrative as being flawed. Her contradictory intentions and representations of Others, reveal her practice to be somewhat hypocritical, as she “for all her insight, tended to diminish human beings”[11], and no social group seemed more diminished by her practice than her late photographs of people with Down’s Syndrome.

Her ‘Notes on the Nudist Camp’ quote the nudist collective as being fond of saying, “When you come right down to it everyone is alike and when you come right down to it everyone is different.”[12] Arbus accentuates the differences of the disabled and marginalised in a way that presents them as being people who cannot be related to because they are at once so human and so unlike the physically typical (a representation of the Freudian Uncanny). The most controversial images in Arbus’s oeuvre are those in the Untitled (1970-71) sequence of black and white photographs captured of the people with Down’s syndrome (or people believed to have Down’s). The exploitative factor of these photos, and what makes them so uncomfortable to a contemporary audience, are the issues of awareness and consent. It is so unlikely that the people in the photography knew that their portrayal by Arbus would be one of abnormality, one that was designed to provoke a reaction of fear or disgust in order for Arbus to structure social commentary around their disability.  Sontag writes of those portrayed by Arbus “Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t”[13] and it is this relationship between her choice and manipulation of subjects and how she presents them that is exploitative. The innocence of the two women wearing bonnets in Untitled (1)­ – mid-laugh, one holding on to the other – is made insidious through Arbus’s comparison of their gleefulness with their situation, both in terms of where they are, and the reality of their conditions. They are photographed against the background of the institution Arbus found them in, standing on patchy grass; the image is not one of freedom or happiness, it is one that identifies the women as being Other in their disconnection from reality, the happiness Arbus considers removed from the truth of their condition and part of their flawed identity in society. The unreality and the grotesqueness that Arbus sees in these people and represents them with is more telling about her approach to them than of the audience she wanted to render shocked and indignant. The famously censorious Arbus Estate’s tight control of images of Down’s syndrome people is significant in examining the nature of the photos. Armstrong prefaces her essay on Arbus with a note on the restrictions they placed on her academic writing about these people in particular:

Some other changes that were requested trod a thin line between matters of fact and judgement: such was the case, the author believes, of the estate’s repeated request not to refer to the untitled series of photographs from the end of Arbus’s career as representing people born with Down’s Syndrome. In the end, the author has chosen to follow the estate’s wishes in that regard, although she has allowed herself the liberty of speculation about the appearance of Down’s Syndrome.[14]

The sensitivity of the Arbus estate in regard to these photographs and criticism of Arbus’s work reveals a great deal about their own attitude to the Untitled series and the negative critique it leaves itself open to because “Arbus is drawn to pursue the momentary horror of their situations rather than honour their courage.”[15] In Untitled (6) the three girls with Down’s who are clearly performing in some kind of way for Arbus are not interesting to her for the joy they are taking in physical activity: their playful showing off is made desperate by Arbus’s posing, and their gymnastics are made to seem like unnatural physical contortions. In capturing these privileged moments of access to innocence, and distorting them to an image that is intended to repulse, Arbus exploits the trust of society’s most vulnerable at their most vulnerable and makes them signifiers of the Other and the grotesque.

The slight discord in scenes of what would be defined as normalcy is by her posing, although she claims to dismiss the idea of composition in her work. ‘A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968, an affluent New York family of three is written into the narrative of the flawed with Arbus’s claim that “every family is creepy in its own way.” But there is a distinct difference between a creepiness born from able-bodied psychological discord and from staring at an oppressed member of society who cannot help but be perceived as creepy because of society’s prejudice towards them and the costume she has put them in.  Germaine Greer comments on Arbus’s photography that: “She may have thought she was getting the mask off, but what she was photographing was actually the clumsy ill-drawn mask itself.”[16] Perhaps the feminist Greer is being overly sensitive in reaction to her own photo-shoot with Arbus, an anti-feminist. She described Arbus as being “assaultive”[17] in practice, making her physically exploitative behaviour an immediate problem beyond issues of representation. But Greer’s criticism has more resonance with the photographs than the narrative Arbus creates around her own practice. Her anti-feminism signifies a denial of her own oppression that is in tune with her ignoring the oppression of those she photographs. It serves as another example of the unrelentingly privileged attitude of someone who considered a difficulty in her life to be the absence of adversity.[18]

The issue of voyeurism is in Arbus’s photography is particular to her subject matter, as much of the discourse about her transforming what was permissible in photography is predicated upon her capturing the underworld of oddballs that America had never experienced. Although Arbus’s photographs were shocking, their subject matter – the freak – was nothing that had not been photographed before. Charles Eisemann’s photographs of carnival performers in New York in the 1880s were incredibly popular in their contemporary context, and the dignity he afforded his subjects (notably ‘JoJo, the Russian Dog Face Boy’) allowed for the people whose talent was their deformity to be represented on a public platform with their consent. Arbus’s photograph ‘Hezekiah Trambles ‘Jungle Creep’ performs five times a day at Hubert’s Museum, 42nd & Broadway, Times Square’ (1960, gelatin silver print, 22.4 x 15.1cm) and the narrative Bosworth presents in her biography of Arbus negatively recontextualises the street performance of the Haitian voodoo man. It stops being the wild performance art of a black man and becomes a profitable image of freakishness for a rich white woman to sell, relevant to issues raised in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978), a text discussing the ongoing exploitative behaviour of the West in the discourse of colonisation. The appropriation of his strange pseudo-cultural performance is ignorant of cultural protocols and intrusive to a man who is recalled in Bosworth’s biography to have wanted nothing to do with Arbus or Bosworth’s source the ‘Amazing Randi’, as Trambles “studiously ignored” them[19]. This photo identifies the problematic issues of consent and exploitation that can be found across Arbus’s oeuvre as well as an overarching denial or ignorance to the significance of cultural context and modes of representation.

It is not unfair to say that Arbus’s practice lends itself to indulgence in a curiosity about what she perceives as grotesque, and provides an opportunity for her fascination with abnormality to have an outlet. By photographing those on the margins and implicating them in the rhetoric of the grotesque Arbus turns vulnerable people into profitable spectacle. The trend for intrusive and exploitative photography in the Modern photography practice is well documented: complaints have been made against Dorothea Lange for misrepresenting the famous Migrant Mother[20], and Garry Winogrand was famously unapologetic for the sexually predatory[21] nature of his practice. Diane Arbus’s portraiture involved similar manipulation and often the distortion of representation to achieve her photographic oeuvre – one marked by vulnerability, otherness and alienation. Her particular photographic practice involves taking the strange and turning it into her own freak show, one that performs for those in the privileged art world. Arbus’s work was more of a response to her own protected middle-class upbringing than a reflection on the human condition or what it is to be a freak – whether celebrated or reviled. Her work went beyond a general exploitation of her subject because her subjects were so physically, mentally or culturally vulnerable. If “to photograph someone is to violate them”[22], Arbus’s work with “freaks” and “mental retardates”[23] is violation manifest and therefore exploitative by nature. 

WORKS CITED: 

Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: Aperture Monograph, (New York: Aperture Foundation Books, 1972

Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, ‘Notes on the Nudist Camp’ (1975), (New York: Aperture Inc., 1984)

Armstrong, Carol. ‘Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus’, October, no. 66 (Fall 1993)

Armstrong, Carol. ‘Automatism and Agency Intertwined: A Spectrum of Photographic Intentionality’. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 4, ‘Agency and Automatism: Photography as Art Since the Sixties,’ edited by Diarmud Costello, Margaret Iversen, and Joel Snyder (University of Chicago Press: Summer 2012), 705-726

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 1984)

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981)

Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984

Dorfman, Elsa. ‘Arbus: A Negative Life?’ The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), 9-11

Evernden, Neil. ‘Seeing and Being Seen: A Response to Susuan Sontag’s Essays on Photography. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Penn State University Press: Spring 1985), 72-87

Feuer, Menachem. ‘Everybody is a Star: The Affirmation of Freaks and Schlemiels through Caricature in the Comics of Drew and Josh Friedman’, Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative, 32, No. 3, (Oxford University Press: Fall, 2007), 75-101

Greer, Germaine. ‘Wrestling with Diane Arbus’. London: The Guardian, 8th October 2005) [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography]

Grover, Janice Zita. ‘Shifts of Focus’, Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 3, No. 10, Women in the World (Old City Publishing, Jul., 1986), 11-12

Moran, Seana, David Croplet and James C. Kaufman, Ethics of Creativity, ‘Dialogic Witness’, Part 3, Chapter 13, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)

Pollack, Maika. ‘Garry Winogrand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and ‘The Photographic Object, 1970’ at Hauser & Wirth’ (London: The Observer, 16th July 2014)

Rabinowitz, Paula. ‘Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism, Film and 1968 – A Curious Documentary’. Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 1, Color, Culture and Gender in the 1960s (Spring, 2001), Guildford Press, 72-98

Ribbat, Christoph. ‘Queer and Straight Photography’ Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1: Queering America (Universitätsverlag Winter Press: Heidelberg, 2001), 27-39

Sontag, Susan. On Photography, iBook edition, New York: Penguin, 1977,

Stallabrass, Julian. ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, October, Vol. 122 (MIT Press: Fall 2007) 71-90

[1] Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 33

[2] Susan Sontag, On Photography, ‘America As Seen Through Photographs, Darkly’ (New York: Penguin, 1977, iBook edition) 62

[3] ibid.

[4] Germaine Greer, ‘Wrestling with Diane Arbus’, (London: The Guardian, 8th October 2005) [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography]

[5] Carol Armstrong, ‘Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus’, October, no. 66 (Fall 1993), 39

[6] Jed Perl, cited by the Tessa DeCarlo in ‘A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus’ (Washington: Smithsonian Magazine, May 2004)

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-fresh-look-at-diane-arbus-99861134/?no-ist]

[7] Sontag, On Photography, ibid. 46

[8] Menachem Feuer, ‘Everybody is a Star: The Affirmation of Freaks and Schlemiels through Caricature in the Comics of Drew and Josh Friedman’, Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative, 32, No. 3, (Oxford University Press: Fall, 2007), 75-101, 78

[9] Paula Rabinowitz ‘Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism, Film and 1968 – A Curious Documentary’, Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 1, Color, Culture and Gender in the 1960s (Spring, 2001), Guildford Press, 72-98, 79

[10] Christoph Ribbat, ‘Queer and Straight Photography’ Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1: Queering America (Universitätsverlag Winter Press: Heidelberg, 2001), 27-39, 35

[11] Andy Grundberg quoted by Janice Zita Grover in ‘Shifts of Focus’, Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 3, No. 10, Women in the World (Old City Publishing, Jul., 1986), 11-12, 11

[12] Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, ‘Notes on the Nudist Camp’ (1975), (New York: Aperture Inc., 1984) 69

[13] Sontag, On Photography, ibid, 54

[14] Armstrong, ‘Biology, Destiny, Photography’, ibid, 30

[15] Elsa Dorfman, ‘Arbus: A Negative Life?’ The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), 9-11, 11

[16] Greer, ‘Wrestling with Diane Arbus’, ibid

[17] Dorfman, ibid

[18] Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Aperture Monograph, (New York: Aperture Foundation Books, 1972): “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was that I never felt adversity.” 5

[19] Bosworth, ibid, 165

[20] “When the subject of Migrant Mother was identified and interviewed 40 years later, she expressed bitterness that her portrait benefited Lange but not herself (Hariman & Lucaites, 2007). The complicated moral implications of using human subjects are further exacerbated by the assumption that what we see is an objective representation—that the woman we experience in the photograph is the woman who was photographed. Photographers, out of necessity, use individuals to construct narrative meaning. Encouraging moral and ethical practices is essential, but as well we need to find metaphors that adequately convey the complexities of photography.” Edited by Seana Moran, David Croplet and James C. Kaufman, Ethics of Creativity, ‘Dialogic Witness’, Part 3, Chapter 13, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) 239

[21] Maika Pollack ‘Garry Winogrand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and ‘The Photographic Object, 1970’ at Hauser & Wirth’ (London: The Observer, 16th July 2014)

[http://observer.com/2014/07/garry-winogrand-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-and-the-photographic-object-1970-at-hauser-wirth/]

[22] Susan Sontag, On Photography, ibid, 25

[23] Armstrong, ‘Biology, Destiny, Photography’ ibid, 35