The exhibition Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, now on view at the Met Breuer in New York, begins with a single and surprising photograph. A newspaper seems to float near the center of a dark horizontal field, its pages blurred, its headlines barely perceptible. Left on the pavement to blow in the wind, the small, battered white object is engulfed, almost consumed, by the blackness surrounding it. There is no person in this picture, no one to return the photographer’s gaze. The sharp, immobile social encounters we associate with Diane Arbus—as with her photograph of two small twin girls staring benignly and sceptically at the viewer—here dissolve into a not-quite-still life that reflects the unmooring of life by Post-war winds of change. Captivating, unsettling, and entirely uncharacteristic of what we think we know of Arbus, Windblown Headline on a Dark Pavement, NYC, 1956 throws the viewer off guard, and signals that she or he is entering into unfamiliar territory.
Arbus’s early works sees America, and especially New York City and its environs, through a glass, darkly. Both familiar and eerily different, the photographs in the exhibition, all from 1956-62, were taken with fast 35 mm cameras, allowing for ease and flexibility on the street. The resulting pictures—almost two-thirds of which have never before been exhibited or published—are rectangular in shape, and highlight dynamism and grain. They are technically different from the sharp, square images we know best, taken when Arbus switched to a Wide-Angle Rolleiflex camera in 1962. Most of the prints now at the Met Breuer were consigned to a box in the basement of her darkroom after the artist adopted her new format and began to consistently emphasise formality over spontaneity. Found years after her death by the artist’s daughters, the photos are ripe for assimilation into the canon that Arbus helped to define when she chose 10 of her favorite pictures, all of them taken in 1962 or after, for inclusion in a portfolio a few years before her death. (Some of those 10 are also on view in a separate room of the exhibition.)
The early photographs must now find their place in her oeuvre, but in fact their existence busts wide open our assumptions about Arbus's development as curators and critics have described it since the 1970s. In the usual art historical evolutionary tale, an artist’s early works are moving with purpose toward the crowning achievement of his or her mature period, so these prints should mark out a clear trajectory that culminates in 1962. But that is not what happens, for several reasons.
The first reason is curatorial, and is embodied in the format of the exhibition. There is no white box, nor long walls lined with pictures; the Met rejected all juxtapositions and progressions of images, which tend to build clear narratives for the ambulatory viewer. Instead, the curator Jeff Rosenheim divided the exhibition space into a dense series of pillars, like a forest of trees. Each pillar has a photograph on the front and another on the back, and the viewer’s movement is open and undefined. Making his or her own path through the maze, each spectator creates his or her own narrative, his or her own history, of Diane Arbus’s world from 1956-62. This exhibition presents its audience with a never-ending story, an unfolding set of possibilities that both deconstruct the mythology of the artist and encourage emerging reconstructions.
Second, the photographs themselves subvert our assumptions about the inferiority and incompleteness of “early works.” These pictures are so powerful that they are impossible to relegate to second-class citizenship within Arbus’s oeuvre. This artist found her subject matter early and definitively. By the 1950s, they are all there on display: strippers, pool players, female impersonators, circus performers and “freaks” share the stage with regular people on the streets, lonely diners, beach bathers and bourgeois matrons. Dramas unfold on televisions, in theatres, in parks and in the kitchens of “little people,” in a unified and complete artistic universe that emerged almost full-blown. The shock is precisely, as Rosenheim writes in the catalog, that this is less “early work” than it is Act One in a career that had two equally accomplished acts.
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning makes clear that this photographer’s “evolution” had less to do with content than with time. Act One is about flux and uncertainty, made possible by the speed, size and flexibility of the cameras she used. Her subjects, whether people or newspapers, exist in a soft, often grainy, visual field that acts like a scrim, a dark glass. They wander, almost floating, isolated and alone; they make their way through streets or interior spaces as they glance at the photographer, just barely piercing the dark obscurity within which they exist. This expressive posture ends with Arbus's change of format in 1962. The adoption of larger, sharper and slower cameras signaled the beginning of Arbus Act Two. The exigencies of this new technology slowed things down, and altered the nature of the encounter between the photographer and her subjects. Posed, aware and sharply clarified, her sitters began to cut through obscurity by returning Arbus’ penetrating gaze, and the camera immobilized the intensity of their engagement. When Act Two arrived, it was announced not by new content, but by a change to a different kind of camera—and with that, a temporal change in Arbus’s relationship to her already established subjects.
According to Arbus's biographer, Arthur Lubow, there was another act in the making when she committed suicide in 1971. She had decided to change cameras again, this time trading in the Mamiya for a Pentax 6x7. Clunky and difficult to manage, the Pentax still allowed her to work with agility. “What it could do,” Lubow quotes her as saying, “is make the pictures more narrative and temporal, less fixed and simple and complete and isolated, more dynamics, more things happening.” There was to have been an Act Three, it seems, and when the artist described it, she saw it once again as a change in her relationship not with her subjects but with time.
Shelley Rice is an Arts Professor at New York University, with a joint appointment between the Department of Photography and Imaging and the Department of Art History
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, Met Breuer, New York, until 27 November