Diane Arbus, Photography of the Everyday or Pictures for the Freak Literature review

Diane Arbus, Photography of the Everyday or Pictures for the Freak Show - literary works review ExampleWhat is far more difficult to grasp from the work included in The wrap up f Photography is that the very frankness f photography can also inspire a whole other kind f artistic posturing. For if directness is photographys glory, it is also liable to be manipulated, use as a sort f alone-purpose rhetorical device, until frankness itself becomes a form f obfuscation or artiness--which is a fair description, I think, f the work f Diane Arbus. Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age f forty-eight, is widely admired as a truth-teller, and if the initial reactions to the brand-new book, Diane Arbus Revelations, are any indication, the woman and her work are exerting as strong an attraction today as they did at the time f the posthumous retrospective at the Museum f Modern Art in 1972. Arbuss warts-and-all photographs, which are at once exposes and benedictions, create just the right kind f psychological massacre for a public that is all too willing to believe that any image that disturbs your equanimity is emotionally authentic, and that the greatest works fart are the ones that leave you wondering if you are yourself emotionally authentic. The public all too easily confuses hyperbole with honesty, and Arbus, who is intent on telling us how awful everything is, is a overlord f the highfalutin creep-out. In a series f photographs f obsoleteer women on the streets f parvenue York, Arbus seems to suggest that these ladies, who quite clearly take considerable pride in looking their best, are in fact ghouls she gives such a sharp-eyed attention to their elaborately made-up faces and carefully arranged clothe that they begin to resemble the transvestites in whom Arbus also took an interest. The very eagerness with which Arbuss ladies out for an afternoon pose for the television camera becomes a measure f their self-delusion. Whats missing is the delicacy that Brassai (whose work Arbus admired) brought to his famous photograph f an old whore, swathed in cheap jewelry, seated in a caf. Brass reminds us that, for all her haggard theatricality, this collapse f a woman is still the proud possessor f a pair f beautiful, velvety eyes. Arbus uses the fixity f the image to deny people their freedom--and in so doing she also denies them their self-esteem. She undermines the adolescent as well as the old, the pretty as well as the ugly. Often photographed front and center, in a dull symmetry, even her most sexually intriguing subjects seem wilted, marooned. Nobody ever looks their best, which is meant as some sort f revelation.