Diane Arbus

(2012)

Susan Sontag, still the best commentator on Diane Arbus’s work to date, once divided photographers into two different categories: scientists and moralists. Whereas the former set out to make an inventory of the entire world, moralists attempt to concentrate their gaze upon the “hard cases.”

Curiously enough, Arbus could be said to fit into both categories at once. For while she once stated that her wish was to photograph everybody, aligning her project with the conceits of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (a novel purportedly about every person that has ever lived) and August Sander’s attempt to photograph every citizen of Weimar Germany, her perspective was utterly lacking in the earnest intentions of scientific cataloguing. Her big subject was vulgarity, and everywhere she looked, she found it. The more normal you seemed to everyone else, the more freakish you appeared to Diane Arbus. Take Patriotic Young Man with a Flag, NYC (1967), from a series of pro-war demonstrators. A freckled ginger with albino eyes stares skywards, an idiot smile adorning his heart-shaped face. The flaccid American flag he waves is echoed by the one on the round button worn on his lapel, under which is inscribed “I’m proud” in block capitals. As a blanket evocation of jingoistic stupidity, this is about as moralistic as it gets.

Arbus was the photographer America never wanted, but always deserved. She was the first to show us what’s wrong with the country in a non-documentary way. It’s difficult to imagine how subsequent dissident clickers of the country’s uglier private reaches would have fared without her example. In order to understand why she did what she did, I think we have to take her at her word when she said she really did intend to photograph everyone out there. What she means is that she didn’t go looking for her subjects; rather, they came to her.