Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience (review)

That there is a serious problem with Diane Arbus scholarship (to put it more bluntly: that it tends to be slightly repetitive, and stuck in a small number of well-marketed clichés) is not a secret. Nor is it a secret that, despite the efforts of many, such as the editors and guest editors of journals such as History of Photography, this problem has much to do with the overprotective attitude of the Diane Arbus estate, which infamously refuses to grant any authorization whatsoever to illustrate academic research on this artist. It comes therefore not as a surprise that this new book on Arbus, which proposes numerous new insights on her work, contains no images at all and also refrains from addressing the personal life and biography of the photographer in detail. Triggered to a large extent by a new exhibition, the 2004– 2006 Revelations show that offered not only unpublished pictures but also more than a glimpse into Arbus’s notebooks and many of the books present in her own library, this study by Frederick Gross is a timely reminder of the importance of Diane Arbus as well as a wonderful attempt to interpret her work against the grain.

Two major stereotypes, both deeply rooted in the artist’s biography, have blocked new developments in Arbus scholarship for several decades: her suicide at age 48, which transformed her into a kind of Sylvia Plath with a camera, and the widely accepted thesis that she somewhat exploitatively focused on one single subject, that of the modern freak (nudists, retarded, dwarfs, transvestites, etc.). In this book, Frederick Gross aims at dismantling this crippling typecasting, not by frontally rejecting it but by proposing a totally different framework intended to supersede most existing understandings and misunderstandings of the work.

The major and dramatic innovation of Gross’s approach is the proposal, well-documented and clearly argued, to study Diane Arbus in light of the tradition of the social panorama and the social portrait gallery. A continuation of the sociological ambitions of all those who, like Nadar, Bradley, Sander, Evans, Frank and many others (yet none of them in the same vein or in the same spirit), considered photography a means to offer the visual analogue of a certain society, the work of Diane Arbus should be read as a postmodern version of it. The word postmodern here does not imply that the photographer is no longer eager to give an encyclopedic survey of the social types and roles of his or her social environment but refers to the fact that this representation no longer claims to follow preexisting or preconstructed “objective” or “positivist” typologies and hierarchies. Arbus shares with the tradition of the social panorama the craving for a visual disclosure of the real, but this disclosure is no longer illustrative (as in the 19th-century model, where photography is expected to prove by showing what had already been told by others). Arbus’s pictures instead refuse the social (class), biological (race) and cultural (ability) assumptions that underlie the available models of explanation, as endlessly repeated by middle-class publications such as Life and Cold War events such as Steichen’s Family of Man. Frederick Gross has the great elegance, which is also a sign of great intelligence, to avoid any political over-interpretation of Arbus’s stances, but his comparative close readings of the famous MOMA New Documents show, which revealed Arbus to the greater public, and the photojournalism of the previous decade clearly demonstrates the critical attitude of Arbus’s pictures (which the contemporary viewers did not interpret as freakish in the very first place). A key issue in Gross’s reading is the notion of pastiche, which he uses in the Jamesonian meaning of the term to point to a more intertextual way of photographing that takes into account the multilayeredness of the real and the intertwining...