In the center of sunlit entablature stood a woman with long brown wavy hair. She batted her eyes, her head swayed with her hair brushing against her long wool blended checked coat. She smiled clutching onto the lapel and crossed her legs. CLICK! She brushed strands of her falling on her face as she walking through the colonnade as the series of flashes captured her perfect smile and pose.
“Gosh!”she finally threw the coat off fanning herself with her hands, “It’s hot out here!”,a crew member came rushing with bottled water and tissue papers.
Photography is a way of telling a story, narrating it without the support of words and expressions. Social media has made photography integrated into our life. It has become a way of expressing our status, social life, and lifestyle.
Diane Arbus is considered one of the controversial American photographers though many critics also inspire her work have taken their words back after a tragic event that had taken the world aback.
Her life as a photographer started in the 1940s-1950s. She started shooting for the famous magazines; Glamour, Vague,and Seventeen along with her husband who had been her high school sweetheart. Unlike many photographers, she did not like the world of fashion. The distaste for the glam world made her explore and develop her noteworthy style.
In the beginning, 35mm Nikonpartnered her, however, as she climbed the ladder of uniqueness 2-1/4 Mamiyaflexbecame her confederate.
She chooses couples, middle-class families, mothers, children, elderly, dwarves, carnival performers, strippers, nudists, and members of the LGBTQ+ community over the models to be portrayed. She has not showcased the life aspired by people but the life in the settings simple, familiar, and often overlooked; streets, homes, workplaces, and parks.
Arbus works have sparked debates among the photographers and intellects: Are her portraits — of circus performers, transvestites, mentally disabled people, and others — empathetic acknowledgments of shared humanity, or are they exploitative depictions that seize upon their subjects’ oddities to shock her audience?
Throughout her career, Arbus broke taboos — in her portraits of people pushed to the edges of society. She often befriended her subjects and some believe that she even seduced them on occasion. She felt empathy with the people she photographed and patronized many marginalized groups of people she met.
Her work is powerful, raw, and unique. In a despotic world where deformities landed people into freak shows she sought beauty in every class and group. Sandra S Philips, a curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, told the Smithsonian magazine in 2004. “She was a great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of a new kind of photographic art.”
People saw what she made them see; the life of the marginalized. No one saw deep into her eyes, the pain of depressive episodes. Few years after the divorce she ingested barbiturates and cut her wrists with a razor, killing herself at the young age of 48.
The world lost a photographer who gave up upon herself while battling the resistance against the socially excluded groups. Her work makes us question: how limited the vision of a man is and how far is he going to look to appreciate the beauty around him.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.— Diane Arbus