Exhibition
Diane Arbus sought to bridge the differences between us by photographing the diversity of humanity.
Diane Arbus’s photographs are camped out at the AGO.
When Diane Arbus said “It’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them,” it wasn’t an idle boast. Through her direct style, technique and chosen subjects, Arbus offered an unsparing exploration of what it is to be human by doing portraits of celebrities, nudists, socialites, carnival sideshow performers and even corpses.
Highlighting its recent acquisition of 522 pictures, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) presents Diane Arbus: PHOTOGraPHs, 1956–1971, a major exhibition that considers the American photographer’s career up until 1971, when she took her own life at the age of 48. Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography, has opted for a chronological approach, distilling Arbus by year so that viewers can experience her evolution as an artist. There’s her famously disquieting portrait of identical twins whose matching dresses help underscore their differences, as well as portraits of cross-dressers, transgender people and a Puerto Rican woman in heavy brow makeup displayed alongside a photo of the late entertainer known as Jack Dracula, covered face to toes with over 300 tattoos, casually reclining bare-chested in the grass. “I think she’s trying to bridge the distance between us, to photograph that diversity of humanity,” says Hackett. “The portraits elicit a range of emotions. She’s confronting us with what we think is beautiful, what we think is ugly, what we think should be seen, what we think shouldn’t be seen.”
In 1961, for example, when Harper’s Bazaar published Arbus’s portfolio of raffish eccentrics (“or rather people who visibly believe in something everyone doubts,” as the photographer once described them), the magazine refused to include what is arguably the series’s most subtly transgressive image: The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman, a portrait of the dapper black lesbian Miss Stormé de Laverie. “She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort,” critic Arthur Lubow has said by way of appraisal.
The show also includes Three Female Impersonators, N.Y.C., 1962, an extraordinary portrait. “The stillness of the three of them and their sort of relationship to one another, the way they’re posed in the frame...it’s a great group shot, and I think they look glorious in their way, in their in-between stage in the dressing room—not fully prepped for performance but not in their street clothes either,” says Hackett. “It’s the midpoint before this transformation that’s about to occur. For her, it was precisely about that difference; reinforcing how different we are from one another was actually a humanizing move—trying to make the tent bigger for what a person is, what a woman looks like, what a man looks like.”
When Arbus’s work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking New Documents exhibition in 1967, New York magazine called it “brutal, daring and revealing,” as much for its unflinching gaze as her choice of outsider subjects. Social progress means these subjects have been normalized, but that assessment still rings true: Her work has lost none of its power to unnerve.
Even though there is more diversity, inclusion and acceptance of the individual than there used to be, says Hackett, this vision is still relevant today given the current cultural climate and its homogenizing impulse. “We see people and a range of experience,” she says. “I think putting this work on view now is a reminder of a moment of openness—of beginning to value difference as a strength and not a threat.” Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 is at the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago.ca) from February 22 to May 18, 2020.