The late great Diane Arbus is widely acclaimed as a brilliant portraitist, maybe even the GOAT. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d want to have your photo taken by her. In Arbus’s hands, a camera became a psychic probe. Aimed at fellow earthlings, it penetrated to the core, searching for fault-lines. Her photographs were veracious and voracious. But flattering? Not so much. “You see someone on the street, she once explained, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.” Vulnerabilities manifested in her photographs of outsiders, nudists, eccentrics, and so-called freaks “born with their trauma”. For Arbus these were fish in a barrel. Amazingly, she found the soft spots in everyday strangers just as easily.
For the next few months, Oregonians can witness firsthand the dark genius of Diane Arbus at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene. The current exhibition Looking Back: Diane Arbus, 1956–1970 displays twenty vintage gelatin prints spanning her brief career, selected from a recent gift of thirty-six photographs by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Framed and matted in an assortment of sizes and formats, they’re mounted on the walls of the West Focus Gallery on the museum’s second level. The show is open through April 12th.
This modest 200-square-foot space has multiple entry points, but I recommend starting in the southeast corner, where a wall-mounted text by the show’s organizer Thom Sempere (JSMA Associate Curator of Photography) briefly sketches Arbus’s life and photographic ideas. “Arbus sought environments and circumstances where identity was being expressed, performed, or negotiated,” he writes. Many of her photos captured all three acts of identity at once.
Moving in a clockwise circle from this point, Arbus’s photos are sequenced roughly in chronological order, just as she made them. They begin with Family At Easter, 1956, a casual study of a mother holding down a park bench between her husband and son. This photo and the six following prints were shot on 35 mm film, before Arbus transitioned to the square medium square format with which she made her name.
To the right are two pictures of unkempt children. They appear happy but feral. Reminder: Do not hire Diane Arbus for your kid’s school portrait. Lesson learned, then it’s on to adult material—sometimes literally—with photos of a female impersonator, a royal impresario, and two vaudeville performers, all shot in 1961 or earlier. Even at this early stage, her alternative leanings were becoming clear. Influenced by Lisette Model, her attentions turned to overlooked subcultures, and well clear of her patrician roots. Arbus’s photographic style hadn’t fully matured, and she had not yet mastered flash or composition. But these primordial frames offer hints of things to come…