Susan Sontag: On Photography; America: Seen Through Photographs, Darkly

 

Diane Arbus

  ”[she] lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases – most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings – who have paused to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidently at the viewer.”

 

Diane Arbus, Woman With A Veil on 5th Avenue NYC, 1968

 

Lartigue Racecourse At Nice 1912

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was stressed by Sontag to compare Diane Arbus’ Woman With a Veil on Fifth Avenue 1968 and Lartigue’s Racecourse at Nice 1912. The different representations of these women convey the completely different views of what a photograph should be aesthetically and thematically. With Lartigue, the women are staring off into the distance and sort of romanticized and implied as being beautiful even though their faces are not shown in the photograph. With Diane Arbus’, the woman is looking at the camera with such a bold, unselfconscious, candid expression that’s voyeuristic and honest. It projects an image with which we do not fall in love with (the aesthetics or the romanticism), but we fall in love with the curious investigation of the sad, pitiable woman in the photograph. Being attracted to the subject is different than being attracted to a photograph. With portraiture, the subject dictates the level of curiosity someone has or the level of admiration someone has. Diane Arbus is one of those photographers who is attracted to the unusual, the outcasts, the freaks sparking curiosity in onlookers for years after her suicide in 1971. 

 

Freaks, 1932

 

Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) with the tagline “Can a grown woman really love a midget?” is a disturbing movie exploiting people who are actually…well freaks. Seen pictured here is a man with no limbs who manages to get around just fine, shave and even lights a cigarette and smokes in one scene. The majority of people in this film actually have something seriously wrong with them physically. For example, real siamese twins, a man with half a body, the “pinheads”, midgets who look like children etc. It’s unclear to me whether this film is a matter of exploitation or recognition for these people. The haunting “one of us, one of us…” chant in the wedding dinner scene, in my opinion, sends a message: Who are the REAl freaks? the people who are different or unusual or the ones judging them because of it?

 

It’s strange that two of my favorite photographers have killed themselves, Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus. Are their pictures so haunting to them that they drive them a little insane OR do they reveal their depression or instability by seeking out these disturbing people and places? Sometimes inner conflicts are projected into what we create, however, like Sally Mann, it’s mostly a scientific fascination with morbidity and the process of death. As eccentric as she is, she is stable, so the argument of the photographs getting to Diane and having them be “dangerous” to her doesn’t seem viable. In my opinion, she was a danger to herself just like Francesca Woodman, Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, Freud, Hunter S. Thompson, Van Gogh and everyone else who ended their lives leaving behind an admirable body of work. It maybe be that everyone has a secret fascination with suicide and tragedy as artists seem to be honored and recognized after they end their lives more so than when they were alive. 

photography is a “sharp eyed witty program of despair.” (Sontag, 48)

~ by heathernoelle on 16 September 2009.