Diane Arbus and the lives of others

By I.W.

THE TITLES of Diane Arbus’s photographs read like short stories. There are tall tales (“The Man Who Swallows Razor Blades”), elegiac utterances (“Windblown Headline on a Dark Pavement”) and statements that hint at her fascination with the way the real and the fictive can be brought together in a single frame (“James Dean in a Wax Museum”). As Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of a new show of Arbus’s work at the Hayward Gallery in London, points out, her predecessors and contemporaries captioned their photographs less descriptively. Those artists—such as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt—usually referred to the place they were taken, and rarely mentioned the content in great detail. But Arbus was different, with titles so vivid and poetic the photographs themselves hardly needed to be seen.

Arbus’s words are testament to the care with which she composed her photographs, and the sensitivity with which she approached her subjects. She captured what many viewed as the “freaks” of her time—or, as Susan Sontag classified them, “assorted monsters and border-line cases”. Arbus’s most famous set of images, “A Box of Ten Photographs” (1971), show a young boy with gigantism towering over his parents; identical twins; an elderly couple at a nudist camp; a young man at a pro-war march; the king and queen, who have never met before, of a senior citizens’ dance. Other works feature human pincushions, contortionists, a young boy clutching a toy hand grenade and people with tattoos covering every inch of their skin. All of these figures look out of the frame at the viewer, captured at the precise moment they see Arbus’s lens.