Women's Work - Diane Arbus

8th December 2009

Post with 12 notes

Diane Arbus - Magazine Work

Diane Arbus, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry, fashion luminary, in her Chestnut Hill home in Philadelphia, Harper’s Bazaar, July 1965

Famous for her harsh “documentary eye” and her unique ability to make the normal seem callous, Diane Arbus began her body of work at a very young age. Arbus married Allan Arbus at just 18; they began producing photos together, at first for “the family business” and then progressed to working for Harper’s Bazaar. In his 1972 article in Time, Robert Hughes described Arbus as saying “What I’m trying to describe, is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not your own.” This quotation perfectly describes the unique yet hard to place quality found even in her earliest of work.

While Arbus is known for her soul shaking portraits, she started her career as a fashion photographer for magazines. These photos, although being beautiful as magazine photos are expected to be, packed a meaningful punch. Arbus began studying photography under Lissete Model in 1959, meaning she had a career for 18 years in working for magazines before she started technically and artistically perfecting the awkward, flat, and completely groundbreaking artistic work that she is so well known for today.

In the forward of Magazine Work, Arbus’ daughter Doon writes that “if the nature of her assignments she was given sometimes compelled her to publish pictures that failed to measure up to her own standards, they also helped extend her range by forcing her to adopt or invent new techniques to fulfill the task.” Arbus’ early professional career was in fact her developing her own rhythm before she began to study under others. She first and foremost made a career for herself and then developed her style.

Diane Arbus, Argentine Poet Jorge Luis Borges in New York’s Central Park, Harper’s Bazaar, March 1969

It is in her Magazine Work portraiture that one can truly see her unique style and identify it. Her portrait of Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges shows how her lens can transform even the most public of figures. While in her later private work she took pleasure in photographing the “normal” citizens of America, for Harper’s Bazaar she was forced to fulfill a few guidelines. Even so, in the portrait of the famous Argentine, she manages to turn a simple scene of a man standing upright with his cane into a mesmerizing and perhaps unsettling frame from which it is hard to break one’s gaze.

Diane Arbus, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, eleventh-generation Americans and renowned film stars of Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East, Harper’s Bazaar, April 1964

It can be argued that the power of Arbus’ work lies in her subjects’ eyes, but it must be noted that she does not create the atmosphere in which she shoots, she merely captures it. She chooses her subject and usually photographs them in a place where they are most comfortable, often their own home. For the 1964 series “Affinities” in Harper’s she photographed sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish. One can notice how she captures the connection between the two and yet still manages to uncover that eerie undertone for which she is recognized. Possibly it is the discomfort of the sisters of standing in the snow that creates the feeling that one needs to hold his or her breath while looking at the picture.

Diane Arbus, Charles Atlas, who was crowned “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” in 1922 by Physical Culture magazine, at his Palm Beach Home, Sunday Times Magazine (London), October 19, 1969

In terms of her subject matter, her portrait of “the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man,” Charles Atlas, demonstrates her desired effect of shooting in the home of her subjects. Not only do his skin tone and almost has-been physique provide clues as to what makes the portraits so compositionally satisfying, but his bodybuilder poses add to the effect as well. The juxtaposition of such a man in his finely decorated home makes for very interesting pictures.

The obviously dated decorum in most of her pictures does not detract from the authenticity, it merely adds a staleness to her work that grows as time passes by and magnifies the peculiar undercurrent associated with both her Magazine Work and later her private ventures.

- - Elizabeth Sankey