Diane Arbus, A Box of Ten Photographs

0:00:05.4 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Peoria Riverfront Museum looking at 10 photographs by Diane Arbus. These are some of the most famous images of the 20th century.

0:00:15.3 Bill Conger: We have 10 of these works. They are in black and white, and they are of a square format. But I think this classical approach is undermined by these incredible people. They are looking at you directly through the lens and through Diane herself.

0:00:31.5 Steven Zucker: So many of the photographers that we think of as street photographers in the 20th century carried small portable Leicas, for example, and would take a photograph quickly and sometimes surreptitiously. Diane carried a Rolleiflex, a fairly large camera, hanging around her neck, so there was no mistaking that she was taking a picture of you. These were not spontaneous photographs in that street photography tradition. Instead, she developed relationships with her sitters. Now, granted, sometimes those relationships were new and fleeting, but in many of them she got to know her subjects, sometimes over months, even years. Diane Arbus and her husband, Allan Arbus, were fashion photographers before she went out on her own. And by all accounts, she hated that work because she felt it was always a lie. It was to create a sense of desire, to show a kind of perfection that was illusory. And what she wanted from her photography was truth.

0:01:32.4 Bill Conger: There is a trust in these images. You in a sense, forget that there was a photographer. It’s you and the subject contained within this amazing square that in itself creates this kind of perfectly symmetrical room.

0:01:46.5 Steven Zucker: And the square is a really hard compositional format to master. Look at the way that the twin girls are cut at the shins. They just reach the very top of the frame. There’s a lovely unevenness in the wall behind them that makes sense because of the diagonal of the bricks that they stand on. And they both look out at us in parallel. They’re identical twins and yet they could not be more different.

0:02:10.5 Bill Conger: Couldn’t be more different. They exist as individuals and they also exist as a singularity. Their arms dissolve into a single arm where you would imagine four hands resting. It almost appears that they’ve merged and you only see three.

0:02:26.3 Steven Zucker: But look at the faces. The girl on the right is so bright and present. She’s making a kind of direct and active eye contact. And there’s that lovely smile that is forming on her face. Her sister is much more distant, at least to me. She’s questioning. And some critics have read this as a kind of expression of good and evil. Diane herself said that the camera reveals truths that even she can’t see. I’m drawn to the photograph on the upper right with the young man who she seems to have stopped on the street. Somehow the camera is looking up at him and yet he’s also looking directly at us, meeting our gaze. What must have happened is that Diane had her camera against her chest and took this photograph looking up at him as her eyes met him above the camera.

0:03:15.3 Bill Conger: His fervor in the moment, the decoration that he’s wearing and with the flag firmly in hand seemingly depicting a celebratory moment.

0:03:27.4 Steven Zucker: In the late 1960s, early 1970s, when demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were growing, here’s a young man that is in the opposite stream. And she trains her lens on him. And he is completely vulnerable and open to us and to our gaze. His coat hangs from him, not well fitted. And his facial features are also relaxed in a similar way. His eyes seem to be asking her, what are your intentions? And so Diane brings out this dialogue between the sitter and herself. And of course, we then inhabit her view.

0:04:03.4 Bill Conger: He’s so difficult to read in this backdrop, this massive stone. It seems formidable and federal in some way. Backing his slouch and his limpness and bolstering some kind of impenetrable quality of that look at the same time.

0:04:23.5 Steven Zucker: There’s only one photograph in this set that doesn’t include people. And it’s an empty living room. But it looks like it’s just a day or so before Christmas.

0:04:32.2 Bill Conger: This is very much an early 1960s living room. Could not be less inspiring and less exciting.

0:04:41.5 Steven Zucker: The 1960s was a time of consumer culture. Sociologists associate it with the growth of the suburbs and with a strong middle class culture. And we see all of those trappings. We see a late model television, a stylish clock, wall-to-wall carpeting, a lovely sofa. And of course, all these presents under this tinsel-laden Christmas tree. But the room is dark. And there is no celebration here. There are no children. There are no parents. It feels empty and it feels stark. And it seems to reveal a kind of critical look at consumer culture, at those goodies that are under the tree and what their real meaning is, and the vacantness, the vapidness of American culture at this moment.

0:05:25.4 Bill Conger: This is one of the most desolate images of Christmas I think that has ever been produced.

0:05:31.2 Steven Zucker: That point is underscored by the fact that the Christmas tree is in shadow. And it seems as if it’s bent over at the top to be able to fit into this low ceiling. It wants to burst forth. Its energy and its joy wants to express itself. But it’s trapped in this home. It’s trapped in this corner.

0:05:50.3 Bill Conger: What Diane does so well is establishes this moment of potentiality. And so we are left with this emptiness. Somebody is going to receive something great. Something life-affirming. But we can hardly imagine what and how.

[music]

This work at Art Bridges

The New Documentary Tradition in Photography on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Adams, 1984).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1945–80 in the United States, an introduction