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Introduction: Between Intention and Effect
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
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1 Introduction BETWEEN INTENTION AND EFFECT Someone told me it is spring. But everyone today looked remarkable just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button feather tassel or stripe, all odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the special shape we come in. —Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Revelations The late 1950s witnessed a fundamental rupture in the photographic representation of Americans. Disenchanted with the universalist vision of humanity proposed by Edward Steichen’s widely popular The Family of Man exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, photographers such as Diane Arbus and Robert Frank immediately sought a more jarring, ironic, critical portrayal of Americans . Working within, yet also against, the genres of photojournalism and portraiture, Arbus and Frank sought to disrupt the photograph’s use as an illustration of a specific ideological discourse that they felt was uncritically aligned to American cold war propaganda widely disseminated in popular periodicals such as Life and Look. This book, the first to offer a sustained critical analysis of the photography of Diane Arbus, reexamines her work by situating it in relation to the history of the photographic “social gallery” and exploring the nature of her relationship to this type of portrait collection. 2 INTRODUCTION What is here defined as the social gallery refers to a group of portraits arranged by the photographer in agreement with an organizing principle measured by a specific set of social conditions that varied historically and were accordant with different popular pseudoscientific theories about reading the body according to typology. Overall—and this is a significant point—Arbus’s work may be read in terms of the tradition of the social gallery, but it is in fact an “antigallery,” ultimately deconstructing the positivist and scientific standards ingrained in this genre’s history. This important new reading offers a novel means of historicizing portraits before and during the 1960s and articulates a new position in relation to the art and visual culture of the era. Arbus most likely did not read Auguste Comte and Hippolyte Taine, the fathers of positivism, but she did not have to in order to be aware of a positivist social climate. (A more complete investigation of positivism and the photographic portrait gallery appears later in the Introduction.) It will be necessary, then, to explore the differences between preconceived, methodical social galleries, such as August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929), which organized individuals according to social class, and Arbus’s work, which, at face value, apparently lacked a coherent principle of organization. Yet, when viewed in retrospect, her oeuvre seems far more systematic and unified a strategy than is recognized by the existing Arbus scholarship .1 Arbus probably never used the term “social gallery” herself, but, given that she died at the age of forty-eight, there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest a reading of her work as a coherent social statement. As such, her work must be historicized more firmly within a culture in which other socially critical projects were being pursued, such as Frank’s The Americans (1958–59) and the portraiture produced by such diverse practitioners as Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol, among others. An explication of specific works by these different sources will reveal a problematization of the positivist and eugenic standards that had, by the 1960s (along with certain tenets of psychoanalysis ), insinuated themselves into the photographic images of popular culture. Working in this terrain, these artworks also contributed to a contemporary tendency to merge art photography with the book or [34.234.83.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:45 GMT) 3 INTRODUCTION magazine page, photojournalism, fashion, and the celebrity portrait. Looking back, we can see this moment in the 1960s as a point of rupture for the social gallery, as each artists’ work, in its own specific way, disobeys the systematicity of the genre. Because Arbus’s impulse was to deconstruct the social gallery and reconstitute it on her own terms, I will term Arbus’s oeuvre a “social panorama” rather than a “social gallery.”2 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines panorama as “a picture exhibited a part at a time by being unrolled before the spectator” and, further, as “a complete and comprehensive view or presentation of a subject matter.” The term panorama is useful if we look at Arbus’s work as a gradual, steady...