Long before we had TV shows dedicated to drag queens, Humans of New York and millions of Instagram feeds searchable under the hashtag “street photography”, we had Diane Arbus — the New York photographer who made her name shooting curious characters on the city’s streets. Her subjects included transvestites and strippers, carnival and drag performers, bodybuilders, nudists, and people she just found interesting: a man inked all over in tattoos, a set of twins — uncanny in their resemblance to each other — or a man of over seven feet tall, stooped and craning his neck in his outsized sitting room. While many of Arbus’ photos including this one — A Jewish giant at home with his parents, in the Bronx, N.Y —, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, or the oddly uncomfortable Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park are so iconic they have assumed a fixed spot in the pop cultural canon, her approach to photography remains inspiring, compelling and controversial, even to a more knowing contemporary audience.
Today, diane arbus: in the beginning opens at the Hayward Gallery in London, and takes Arbus’ early career from 1956 to 1962 as its focus. Presenting 100 images, with some 50 that have never been exhibited before in Europe, this is set to be an important exhibition for any fan of searing, stirring, and unflinching portraiture. While we may inhabit an image-overloaded society, photography is still regarded as a truth-telling device, and Arbus’ distinctive images, caught on her 35mm, embody that belief. Capturing subjects from Fifth Avenue to Coney Island, Arbus revealed what German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously referred to as the “optical unconscious” — the idea that photographs show what the naked eye cannot see. With her camera, Arbus publicised the existence of marginalised people who ordinarily slipped beneath the cracks of conservative and sterile societies.
Although Arbus has been criticised for her tendency to photograph outsiders (most notably by Susan Sontag in The New York Review of Books, who condemned Arbus for photographing “freaks”), she regarded her occupation as a vocation: “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them”. Even though we are drawn to Arbus’ images on account of their frankness, conversely Arbus herself, believed a photograph to a be an object of mystery, a cipher, an enigmatic fragment that betrays us as soon as we think we understand it. As she famously said, “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
diane arbus: in the beginning opens on 13 February and runs through to 6 May 2019 Hayward Gallery Upper Galleries.