Visionary Voyeurism

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You can't miss the fact that the wary father in that picture is looking at us as if he suspects Arbus might be turning him and his wife and kids into emblems for some human condition he's none too interested in symbolizing. Arbus knew how photographers cajole their subjects and occasionally deceive them. But even "concerned" photographers typically make us feel sorry for their suffering subjects, although our pity may be the last thing the subjects ever wanted. No one will ever feel sorry for the sovereign specimen who looms toward us in Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in N.Y.C., Arbus' 1970 portrait of a very short man who is stripped to the waist and sitting on a bed but still managing an erotic swagger.

Around 1962, Arbus switched from a 35-mm camera to a twin-lens Rolleiflex that produced the weighty figures in a square format that became her trademark. It gave her pimply drag queens the mighty tonnage of Rodin's Balzac. Our predispositions still place pressure upon the images in the hope of making them conform to conventional expectations. This is a dwarf, file under "Curiosity"; this is a retarded child, file under "Compassion." But the pictures keep refusing to fit into those files. In that refusal is the enduring power, both of the pictures and the people.

For years Arbus had been subject to depression so severe she sometimes had trouble leaving her apartment. When she finally took her life, by swallowing barbiturates and slashing her wrists, she died in her bathtub, fully clothed. When her body was discovered days later, it was partially decomposed. But who understood better than she that the fully human condition has its grotesque dimension? And who had worked harder to prepare a field of understandings in which even misery could be understood as a subdepartment of dignity? "I really believe," she once wrote, "there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them." She was right.