PHOTO:Diane Arbus-Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

From about 1963 until her death in July 1971, Diane Arbus produced a body of photographic portraits of generally uncelebrated people whom she found to be of exceptional interest. These pictures challenged the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography of the period had been predicated. Her work was concerned primarily with psychological rather than visual coherence, with private rather than social realities, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her true subject was no less than the interior life of those she photographed.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery

The exhibition “Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited” re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Diane Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since “Diane Arbus: Revelations”, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago. In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though widely admired and respected by other photographers and artists, Arbus was not well known at the time of her death. When the exhibition opened, on 7/11/1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most highly attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines down the block to see it. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion”. Diane Arbus’s pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest, for they deal with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than historical facts, with the proto­ typical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her photographs record the outward signs of inner mysteries. Often, though less often than is thought, the nominal subject matter of her pictures was exotic. Among her best portraits are many of transvestites, nudists, other ideological specialists, freaks, and the mentally retarded. The meaning of these pictures has been missed by those who have not seen that in them (as in those that she made of the rest of us) her true subject was no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed. Her most frequent subject was in fact children, perhaps because their individuality is purer, less skillfully concealed, closer to the surface. She was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs each day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it can be, given talent, dedication, intelligence, and discipline. Her interest in the medium’s tradition was broad and generous, but her own favorite predecessors were those whose work nourished her own: August Sander, Brassai and Bill Brandt. She revered these photographers for the precision of their feeling, the economy of their description, the blunt immobility of their imagery, and surely also for their knowledge of darkness. In their photographs she found an unornamented truthfulness that was resonant with her own guesses. Her life as a serious photographer spanned scarcely more than a decade. At forty-eight, at the end of her life, she resembled at first glance a game but slightly worried child. Both the youth and the uncertainty were doubtless in part cultivated, designed to create a precisely measured suggestion of amateurism, that might partially conceal both her superior intelligence and her fierce ambition. The ambition was of the most demanding kind, since its object was not applause or money or power, but personal excellence. Arbus knew that honesty is not a gift, endowed by a native naivete, nor a matter of style, or politics, or philosophy. She knew rather that it is a reward bestowed for bravery in the face of the truth. Those who have been news reporters, and have been required by their role to ask the unforgivable question, know the sense of relief with which one averts one’s eyes, once perfunctory duty is done. Arbus did not avert her eyes. She stuck with her subjects, exploring their secrets (and thus her own) more and more deeply. She was surely aware of the danger of this path, but she believed that her bravery would be equal to the demands she made of it.

Photo: Diane Arbus, A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968, Gelatin silver print, Image: 14 5/8 x 14 3/4 inches (37.1 x 37.5 cm), Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm), Framed: 24 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches (62.9 x 52.7 cm), Edition of 75, Printed by Neil Selkirk, Signed verso in ink by Doon Arbus for the Estate of Diane Arbus; estate stamp verso. © The Estate of Diane Arbus, Courtesy The Estate of Diane Arbus and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 24/4-21/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/