Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience

4. Madness, Disability, and the “Untitled” Series

133 4 Madness, Disability, and the “Untitled” Series Agood bit of Arbus’s last work, now known as her “Untitled” series , dealt with images of the mentally “retarded.” In a letter to Allan Arbus on November 28, 1969, she indicated the significance of these works, writing, “FINALLY what I have been searching for” (Revelations, 203). But what was she searching for? Why was Arbus so enthralled by this particular subject matter? As mentioned in my earlier discussion of pastiche, Arbus’s “Untitled” series is categorically related to historical groups of photographs of the mentally retarded or insane—between which, in the eyes of pseudoscience, there was little difference. In terms of a sustained category, Arbus may have looked again to August Sander, who had taken sensitive, frontal photographs of the mentally ill—for example, his “Inmate of an Asylum,” of 1930. Avedon’s photographs of the mentally ill in his book Nothing Personal also are a precedent but seem only part of the equation. In the same letter, Arbus mentioned her desire to produce a book showing her images of the mentally retarded (a category that seems to collapse women with Down syndrome and women who are mentally ill): “The book about the retarded ladies really excites me. I could do it in a year. . . . it’s the first time I’ve encountered a subject where the multiplicity is the thing. I mean I am not just looking for the BEST picture of them. I want to do lots . . . and I ought to be able to write it because I really adore them.” But the book was never begun. Only much later, in 1995, were these images published, in a book called Untitled.1 134 MADNESS AND THE “UNTITLED” SERIES From 1969 to 1971, Arbus visited homes for the mentally challenged, taking pictures at dances, festivals, picnics, and Halloween parades. She read a number of texts related to the subject. In her personal library , she owned Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, by Erving Goffman (1963); Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics, by R.D. Laing and A. Esterton (1965); Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960); and Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, by Marguerite Schelhaye (1951).2 Yet her intentions in publishing this series she was so excited about ultimately remain unclear. We will never know which images Arbus would have included in the book, what the titles would have been, or what she would have written. Only her notes about some of the mentally retarded people she photographed still exist (see Revelations, 204). What is certain, however, is that this body of work represented a change in her conceptual method. In the same letter to Allan, Arbus states, “I am not looking for the best picture of them,” meaning one, or possibly two, standout photographs; she says, “I want to do lots.” This work, then, was to be read in terms of a “multiplicity,” a greater number of photographs than appeared in her mainstay, the photostory format, which averaged around five published pictures. What seems fairly radical about this conceptual shift, and what constitutes one of her most lasting critiques of typologies, is that these touching, evanescent photographs may be said to dislocate the stigma of madness associated with “freakish” physiognomies in photographic galleries. Sander’s “Inmate of an Asylum,” and Richard Avedon’s series of photographs of the mentally ill, entitled “Patients in a Mental Institution ,” taken in 1963 and appearing at the end of Nothing Personal, represent the ground from which Arbus’s “Untitled” series emerged. Analysis of this connection will follow a brief historical discussion of the representation of madness, and how it shifted in the 1960s. There is a long history of the representation of madness in portrait galleries, from Théodore Géricault’s Monomania portrait series (1821–24) and Francisco Goya’s sketches of madmen from Bordeaux (1824–28), through nineteenth-century photographers including Hugh Welch Diamond and Duchenne de Boulogne, through August 135 MADNESS AND THE “UNTITLED” SERIES Sander and the present day.3 The photographic galleries almost always illustrated publications.4 Antonin Artaud was one of the first voices recognized by the parallel avant-garde practices of art and literature to question interpretations that made photography the veristic document of madness. Writing about the “state of mind” that constituted insanity, Artaud introduced an awareness of the subjectivity involved...