The photography of Diane Arbus is much more than the work of a voyeur

When I was around 12 years old, a small, blood-red booklet suddenly appeared in our house. It had come with a copy of FHM; one of those adult goody-bag gifts that magazines were once so fond of offering. It didn’t take long for my sister and I to understand that whatever was inside that little red book was not for children, was in fact too shocking even for adults – phrases that are transformed by kids into large neon ‘STEP RIGHT UP’ signs. And so, sneaking looks after school, we found out about the soldier whose face was torn off by artillery, and the Indian girl with too many legs; about the man whose fingernails had calcified into spirals, and the arms lost in a drastic tug-of-war. The book dealt in that brand of morbid voyeurism that stretches from the Victorian freakshow to the back-alley subreddit — FHM’s glossy carnival of the damaged and the strange, built to fit in a man’s back pocket.

It is to here that many have relegated the work and projects of Diane Arbus, who find in her subject matter something invasive, who see the vulnerable taken advantage of. In her 15-year career as a ‘serious’ photographer – between her departure from profitable fashion shoots and her suicide – Arbus captured those figures often found at the cold edges of the mainstream. She sought those who were then considered subversive or abnormal: the burlesque and transgender communities of New York; the physically or mentally disabled; the tattooed men and the bearded women. By singling these people out, so the feeling goes, Arbus was in fact abusive, and her artistic endeavours the cruelties of a voyeur. And even worse, what might she be suggesting about her country in these portraits? One way or another, somebody, somewhere, is being taken for a fool. “All Arbus’s photographs are similar,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1973. “They could all have been taken in one village in Lower Slobbovia. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America.”

Looking at the work on display at Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, the new exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, it is hard to find this so-called voyeur. Arranged chronologically, the show “brings together some 90 photographs by the artist, which were carefully chosen from among the 522” owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Included in these 90 are some of Arbus’s most iconic images, like the fantastic “Child with a toy grenade in Central Park,” but it would be wrong to expect a Greatest Hits album. Instead, the exhibit is an insistence on the figure of the artist, one whose mission was informed less by exploitation, and more by an escape from her own context.

This emphasis on Arbus the artist and woman is immediate: upon entering the exhibit, the first photograph seen is a nude self-portrait, taken in 1945. Arbus is in her 20s and pregnant, looking almost mystified by her own reflection. The placement suggests a pre-emptive defence. The child of a wealthy New York family, Arbus was privileged in ways many of her subjects couldn’t have dreamed of. And it was that very safety — the frictionless, upper middle-class childhood — that pushed her to find its antithesis. This, of course, would seem like a point against her in regard to exploitation. In this light, her biography labels her as a tourist, visiting the lower classes and the city’s underground, making postcards out of misery.

“A Puerto Rican Woman with a beauty mark, N.YC.,”

But look, the self-portrait says at the entrance: she was not separate from those she deemed ‘freaks.’ And this I think is a mis-step, because in the face of these portraits, it is clear that Arbus requires no defence, no validation of ID, and that the only tourists in play are the viewers. Take, as an example, “A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C.” from 1968, in which the subject faces the camera with a self-assured confidence, as if Michelangelo’s David has been visited at home by a friend. Or, as an emotional contrast, look to “A Puerto Rican Woman with a beauty mark, N.YC.,” a loud and melodramatic portrait. Yet for all the intensity on display, the cloud of black hair and heavy shadow, it is her gaze that you return, somehow both formidable and naïve. Arbus spent a long time with the people she photographed, entering into a dialogue, framing psychologies, slipping past the easy stereotypes.

Since the exhibit is a condensed version of Arbus’s artistic life, the development in her talent is held in relief. To move from her early, intimate snapshots of New York, across to those of her “Untitled” project — portraits taken at a home for the developmentally disabled — is to witness both a literal and an imaginative expansion. Alongside the prints are quotes from Arbus, whose writing could be as striking as her images. “I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present,” she writes in the Guggenheim application included in the exhibit. “I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.” Arbus described her intention this way at various points in her career, calling what she did a kind of “contemporary anthropology,” but artists are rarely the best people to trust when it comes to their own work.

There is of course an anthropological element to her projects, but consider that expansion in her short career — compare “Woman carrying a child’ from 1956 with “Untitled (6),” shot 15 years later, and you see that more than anything else, Arbus was the photographer-as-novelist; that her lens was searching not for classifications, but character. This is why each portrait seems to flood our attention, why these figures exist so completely. This is why the women in “Untitled (6),” delighted in their play on the open lawn, refuse to be cliched or patronized: there is simply no more room left in their day. ■

Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971 is on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 29, 2023. For more, please visit the museum’s website.

For more Montreal arts coverage, please visit the Arts & Life section.