Visionary Voyeurism

By Richard Lacayo/San Francisco

If you think you are capable of living without writing," said the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "do not write." He didn't live to meet Diane Arbus, but if he had seen her photographs he would have understood her right away. Those portraits of sideshow performers and weeping children, her matter-of-fact nudists and naked transvestites, her pictures of "them," her pictures of "us"--something of consequence is at stake here, and it's not just art. Arbus worked at the point where the voyeuristic and the sacramental converge. She lies in wait for your first misstep in her direction. Then she dares you to stare at something--a little boy with a toy hand grenade, a dominatrix embracing her client--until you admit your own complicity with whatever it is in there that frightens you. At that point, all the picture's traps unfold, and it confers its rough grace. Like it or not.

"Diane Arbus: Revelations," the retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is very much like any single Arbus image--powerful and weirdly but irresistibly moving. The last major Arbus exhibition was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1972, one year after she committed suicide at age 48. The current exhibition, which was co-organized by Elisabeth Sussman, a guest curator, and Sandra S. Phillips, the museum's chief curator of photography, is poised to be one of the blockbusters of the next few years. After it closes in San Francisco on Feb. 8, it travels (and travels) to Los Angeles; Houston; and New York City; then to Essen, Germany; London; and Minneapolis, Minn.

The accompanying book, Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House) includes a detailed chronology of Arbus' life that was prepared with the assistance of her daughter Doon, who controls the Arbus estate and who long refused to allow writers to use Arbus pictures to accompany their work unless they submitted it first to her for approval. But Diane Arbus is no longer shocking in the way she was 30 years ago. To begin with, the world has changed. (A man with tattoos on his face? Take any bus.) More than that, we've absorbed the lessons that Arbus taught. If she still appears to us in part as the old master of our near universal taste for the perverse and marginal--the Norman Rockwell of our dark side--we understand better now not to think of her as tour guide to the human freak show.

When she photographed a Jewish giant at home with his parents or a Christmas tree in Levittown in fullest bleak regalia, Arbus was situated between complicity and awe, a place where irony is beside the point and mere compassion has been left behind for something like mordant communion. It all makes for some complicated feelings. There's not a false or sentimental image anywhere in this show, yet one of the final groupings of pictures, in which retarded children face the camera to throw us back at ourselves in difficult ways--can move you to places where tears are not out of order. You're just not sure why.

We think of Arbus as so quintessentially modern that it's a shock to remember that she was a child of the flapper age and the Depression. She was born Diane (she pronounced it Dee-ann) Nemerov in New York City in 1923. Her father was the director of Russek's, a Manhattan fur and fashion emporium that had been founded by her mother's family and made them rich. Arbus, her younger sister Renee and her older brother Howard--later a U.S. poet laureate--grew up on Park Avenue. She spoke once of realizing the existence of another world, a forbidden zone, when her nanny took her to Central Park to see a shantytown built there by unemployed men.

As it turned out, Arbus would be crucial in the transition that documentary photography made from the social concerns of the '30s to the personal obsessions it began to take on in the 1950s. She went to private schools but never college. In 1941 she married Allan Arbus, who worked in her father's store. After the war they opened a fashion-photography partnership. In the '50s she studied with Lisette Model, a photographer who knew the power of people thrust forward heavily into the frame. In time Arbus' marriage decayed, but all the while she was creating herself.

"A photograph is a secret about a secret," she once wrote. "The more it tells you the less you know." Her simplest pictures, like A child crying, N.J., could have an unfathomable power, but her most basic aim was not so mysterious. Arbus wanted anyone who viewed her images to find spiritual kinship with her sideshow freaks and drag queens. She also wanted viewers to discover, in her photographs of "ordinary" people, what was feral or bleak or unnerving in us all. It's all there in A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C., a couple with their attempted aplomb undone, even though they don't know it, by the wild and lyrical distraction in the face of their little boy at the bottom of the frame.

You can't miss the fact that the wary father in that picture is looking at us as if he suspects Arbus might be turning him and his wife and kids into emblems for some human condition he's none too interested in symbolizing. Arbus knew how photographers cajole their subjects and occasionally deceive them. But even "concerned" photographers typically make us feel sorry for their suffering subjects, although our pity may be the last thing the subjects ever wanted. No one will ever feel sorry for the sovereign specimen who looms toward us in Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in N.Y.C., Arbus' 1970 portrait of a very short man who is stripped to the waist and sitting on a bed but still managing an erotic swagger.

Around 1962, Arbus switched from a 35-mm camera to a twin-lens Rolleiflex that produced the weighty figures in a square format that became her trademark. It gave her pimply drag queens the mighty tonnage of Rodin's Balzac. Our predispositions still place pressure upon the images in the hope of making them conform to conventional expectations. This is a dwarf, file under "Curiosity"; this is a retarded child, file under "Compassion." But the pictures keep refusing to fit into those files. In that refusal is the enduring power, both of the pictures and the people.

For years Arbus had been subject to depression so severe she sometimes had trouble leaving her apartment. When she finally took her life, by swallowing barbiturates and slashing her wrists, she died in her bathtub, fully clothed. When her body was discovered days later, it was partially decomposed. But who understood better than she that the fully human condition has its grotesque dimension? And who had worked harder to prepare a field of understandings in which even misery could be understood as a subdepartment of dignity? "I really believe," she once wrote, "there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them." She was right.