Photographer Diane Arbus once said: “Most people will spend their lives and they will have traumatic experiences.” “Freaks are born with their trauma. They have passed the test of life. They are nobles.” The way we talk about people has come a long way. Sadly, we don’t treat people the way we treat people. Arbus has a trick to capture the indoor life of people on the fringes: “Freaks” in a circus show, “female imitators” in a nightclub, an appendage to a boyfriend, an old woman wearing white gloves and pearls, and white gloves on her shoes. We can learn how these people are treated and live in the environment through Arbus’ lens. Her photos are and are invitations to interact with others.
Arbus brings us the edge, the invisible, forgotten. In her words, she reminds us: “The error is to think that people are sealed and absolutely. They are just tools of life, and it flows through them until the edges are invisible.” This is the sign of a true artist – a person who goes beyond the comfort zone of society and digs out the unknown. She is unique, indelible, brave, dedicated to her work, powerful and hard to ignore.
Arbus was born in Manhattan in 1923 and died of suicide at the age of 48. In between, she has two daughters with photographers Allan Arbus: Doon and Amy. She takes photos of Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Sunday Times Magazine and Artforum, often accompanying the story with her own words. Her topics include Mae West, film stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish, poet and close friends Wh Auden and Marianne Moore, Marcel Duchamp and Agnes Martin. A camp of nudists, carnival acts such as razor and sword swallows, twisters, strippers, dwarves, “dwarfs” and poor shares, and the elite of society, all become art under her gaze.
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Her subjects often stare directly at the camera, making herself viewed and censored. In some cases, subjects’ self-supervision aroused anger. Norman Mailer doesn't appreciate his “stretch” New York Times book review portrait. Of course not; it perfectly reflects his self-efficiency. Germaine Greer considers Arbus’s photo a “undeniable bad photo” and calls her work “original.”
Apart from criticism, Arbus's ruthless photo won her two Guggenheim scholarships and sparked a long-term friendship with Richard Avedon and Jay Gold. In 1967, an exhibition at MOMA four years before her death showed her work alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. She exhibited her first major retrospective at MOMA a year after her death – the same year she was the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale. She has been strong over the past few years, and daughter Doon wrote: “Her suicide seems neither inevitable nor spontaneous, neither confusing nor understanding.” In other words, why?
Today, David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery in Los Angeles are showing “The Great Disaster: A Retrospective Reexamination of Diane Abus,” an exhibition of 113 photos commemorating Arbus’ 1972 “Review of the Dead” at MOMA. This is her first major investigation into working in Los Angeles in more than 20 years. The title “Cataclysm” refers to the differences in perspectives about Abs’ work. Some praised her unusual images, such as documentaries of daily life. Others, such as Susan Sontag, feel that they lack compassion, and Arbus wants to “break their innocence and undermine her sense of privilege.” Sontag believes that these photos of sexual underworld and genetic freaks never show their emotional distress. “Photos of deviant and real freaks do not cause their pain, but their separation and autonomy.”
Abs herself said she wanted to show people's dignity. The audience can clearly see the difficulties these people encounter every day of their lives. Their weakness is undeniable, as is their weird performance in carnival. Arbus chose another view—as a real person, it was a strange view, just as the subjects longed for a desire to be seen as normal. Arbus gave them this opportunity and then made them dignified again. She did cause a lot of turmoil and controversy around her work, and I think she might like it. The controversy has attracted a lot of attention.
To her credit, she has been photographing these people and often becomes friends with them. Eddie Carmel has been friends with the “Jewish Giant” throughout his life because he never complained about appreciating his condition due to an unbearable pituitary tumor. Jewish man with his parents in Bronx, New YorkPhotos taken a year before her death showed Carmel towering over his short parents, bent over a room, too small for him to talk to. Another topic is Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in New York The man looked at the camera without a doubt in a fedora and bearded beard. These photos stir and excite us in many different ways, as if Abs’ intention. The late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl is one of her admirers. “Her greatness, an empirical fact, is still not fully understood.”
A great book Diane Abs Documentspublished by David Zwirner and Fraenkel, is now available. Among them, is a treasure trove of seventy documents, including articles from 1967 to the present, criticism and prose, and pages on her notebook, many of her ideas list: “The Secret Man, the Swallowing Dust, the Chess Dwarf Man, the Magician's Secret, and more pages in her unavailable writing.
Stories about her life are as controversial as her photos, such as incest relationships with her brother and her sexual behavior. But talking about her private life and her work or any of the original artists is a detriment to their craft, dedication and professionalism. Now, we have even published a therapy course by Joan Didion; her meticulous notes certainly are not for the public. She did not modify these sentences as she had published. Just like Arbus did with the camera, she worked hard.
However, we may feel about the artist’s work (whether we like it or not), and this concern still belongs to the work itself. If we give Abs a long-term focus on her photos, we can see past reactions become observations. Going over the surface and maintaining interest – it's all important work required, and it's appreciated. This is at least what we can do.
“Disaster: 1972's Diane Arbus review” will be exhibited on June 21, 2025 at 606 N Western Avenue in David Zwirner in Los Angeles.Diane Arbus: Constellation”The exhibition debuted in May 2023 at Luma Arles and opened on June 5, 2025 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
