Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience

1. Documentary Photography and the Positivist Social Gallery

31 1 Documentary Photography and the Positivist Social Gallery The photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a product of human labor, a cultural object whose being—in the phenomenological sense of the term—cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates. —Hubert Damisch, Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image From its inception, photographic social-panorama portraiture was invested with positivist content that, despite aesthetic shifts, remained intact until the 1960s. Engaging in an extended flashback, this chapter traces the threads of positivist, typological discourse from the sixties back to the early twentieth century to see how deeply ingrained such discourse had become. I do not intend to pursue a comprehensive history of the galleries, only to focus on their historical significance along a trajectory ending with Arbus’s antigallery. From circa 1850 until circa 1960, the reception of photographs took place in a sociocultural context in which some type of positivist looking, usually in the form of the pseudoscience of physiognomy, was common. This type of looking was largely unquestioned, a universal truth; part of an acceptable sociological, and thus scientific, means of understanding human 32 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE POSITIVIST SOCIAL GALLERY beings. Positivist looking, and its relationship to phrenology and, later, eugenics, always had its dissenters but was not rejected on a broader cultural scale until the 1960s. Arbus’s own collection of photographic books suggests a preoccupation with photographers from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose work contained galleries of social types. She had in her own library books by or featuring the work of photographers such as Mathew Brady, August Sander, and Erich Salomon that were not yet well known outside the professional circles of photography. In general, though, her collection reflects the wider range of titles made available in the sixties than in any previous decade. Generally, her collection suggests a preoccupation with photographers who took portraits and photographed people as a record of their social situation.1 Arbus owned books on or images by most of the photographers mentioned in this book. My analysis in this chapter will focus upon Arbus’s relationship to the social-panorama portraits of Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Brassa ï, Walker Evans, and August Sander. However, they are by no means the only practitioners whose photography contains positivist content. Despite the apparently arbitrary nature of the selection of these photographers , they have been chosen to demonstrate, first, the international nature of positivism and its various interpretations in different countries, and, second, the degree to which their work represented important aesthetic junctures in twentieth-century photography. Arbus was highly aware of this history, and her view of it represented an entirely novel understanding of the portrait. Historicized collectively, portraits by these photographers exemplify the transition of positivist content in photographic portraiture from the twenties to the postwar period. Each section of the chapter deals with a different photographer and focuses on the social climate in which he or she operated, yet Arbus always remains in our field of vision. Her serious artistic work, beginning around 1958, represents the end point of this history. Thus, the 1950s are where this flashback begins. What were Arbus’s immediate influences? 33 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE POSITIVIST SOCIAL GALLERY The Fifties: Edward Steichen’s Family of Man, Robert Frank’s The Americans The period roughly from 1955 to 1965 was one of profound change in the way that photographers conceived of the social panorama. After World War II, the image of the American was glorified in the media, bolstering the political stance of the nation during the cold war years. Swiss photographer Robert Frank, along with Arbus (with whom he became friendly in the late 1950s), felt that the image of the American promulgated in the American mass media was a hypocritical myth—a mirage masking more brutal realities, such as poverty and racial segregation . Frank’s seminal book The Americans (1958–59) represented the first significant challenge to America’s image of itself.2 Most photojournalism made around the time Frank was photographing The Americans was optimistic and upbeat in its presentation of Americans, reflecting the attitude of a prosperous postwar America; this phenomenon has been well documented.3 Wendy Kozol argues that the prevailing climate of photojournalism in Life as a “window onto the truth” produced a hegemonic form of cold-war photographic representation...