For many of us, the late New York photographer Diane Arbus is an acquired taste — or even something of a guilty pleasure. Within the art world, she’s long been controversial. Outside the art world, she’s hardly a household name, though perhaps she should be.
An unexpected gift over the past two years to the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art from Jeffrey Fraenkel, owner of the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, included 36 Arbus photographs, some printed by the photographer herself. The gift prompted a small but entrancing exhibit of 20 black-and-white images, on view through July 5 in the museum’s Focus Central Gallery. Photographers, especially, will want to check this one out.
Arbus, who died by suicide in 1971 at the age of 48, is the photographer who brought us the best known picture ever made of twins. Her 1967 black-and-white photograph titled “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey,” locks her deadpan eye on two 7-year-old sisters, dressed identically and looking balefully at the camera — one with an uneasy smile and the other with a scowl.
Like much of Arbus’s work, the photo is not quite disturbing, but certainly has an air of unease. It would go on to inspire the truly disturbing twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and has been referenced repeatedly in other artistic media. A print of the photo sold at Sotheby’s in 2004 for $478,000, making it one of the most expensive photographs in art history.
The JSMA show, titled Looking Back: Diane Arbus 1958-1970, doesn’t offer the twins, or the exasperated boy with the toy hand grenade, or the circus freaks or Halloween-costumed patients at a mental hospital that are among Arbus’s best known and most controversial works. Some critics, most notably Susan Sontag, disparaged the photographer as exploitative of her subjects. “Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings,” she wrote in a 1973 essay titled “Freak Show.”
I beg to differ. For me — and yes, I’m a photographer — Arbus elevated her subjects by taking a thoughtful interest in them, often spending months getting to know the socially marginalized people in front of her lens. “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” she is widely quoted as saying. “Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Whether or not you approve of Arbus and her work, she remains, half a century after her death, a highly influential artist in American culture.
Curated by Thom Sempere, the museum’s associate curator of photography, Looking Back doesn’t include any of Arbus’s greatest hits. It has no circus freaks or mental hospital patients, though it does include a nudist and a cross dresser or two. As its title indicates, this show spans her entire career. It reaches into the past, showing the younger photographer’s rectangular images using a 35mm camera before she moved to a Rolleiflex twin lens camera and its square format, for which she would become known.
Traces of the more mature vision yet to come can be seen in such early works as 1961’s “His Serene Highness Prince Robert de Rohan Courtenay, N.Y.C.” The photo shows a foppish gentleman, an Oklahoma native living in New York, who claimed to be a prince of the Byzantine Roman Empire and whom Arbus befriended. The photo shows him wearing a top hat and smoking a cigarette in a holder while lounging in his opulent Manhattan apartment.
The show also has some quirkiness. Across the gallery, I saw a landscape photo. Arbus is not exactly known for landscape work. Only on closer examination did I see that the “landscape” was actually two adjoining sections of a large mural inside a bank building, perhaps the photographer’s reflection on our distant relationship with nature.
Offering context for viewers not familiar with Arbus’s better known photos, the JSMA has set out several books about her and her photography on a table in the middle of the gallery — a nice touch.
The show is booked to run into the summer. I hope that in the near future we’ll be seeing the rest of the work that the Fraenkel Gallery gave the museum.
Looking Back: Diane Arbus, 1958-1970 runs through July 5 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the UO campus. Hours are 11 am to 8 pm Wednesday, 11 am to 5 pm Thursday through Sunday. Admission is $5, $3 for seniors, free for students and children under 18. Admission is pay as you wish after 5 pm Wednesday.