December 2003

     Entering this exhibition is like walking into a Richard Serra spiral. Immediately you slow down. There are many pictures and time to look. The sequencing is not chronological. Each picture stands alone, yet follows from the previous one like word in a sentence. In her very early work you can see her willingness to just try things. There are notebooks, lists and letters. Her thoughts and one dream are on the walls. In one of her self-portraits she looks back at us with an expression similar to other faces in the exhibition. She shows us what she sees in other people. But nobody smiles or seems to enjoy themselves except a Jewish Couple in NY, l963 and a few institutionalized women, 1970. Most of Arbus’ people are proud to have been picked out. They accept their situations. No one is resigned. A few are wary, but not hostile. Everyone is calm. Some are monumental, most are just solid. All are looking straight at us or at Arbus, but she is looking down into her camera waiting and from the consistency of her pictures, finding what she is looking for. It is not Bresson’s decisive movement, intoxicated by life’s possibilities. It is a sober and stripped down view of this life. Everyone tries to be themselves, but gets beaten and dismissed in their efforts. She takes the time to notice and record. And she always sees the same thing. It is not by accident that the Blind Couple in Their Bedroom, Queens, 1971 look at the camera in the same way that the other sitters do.
     When these pictures were first exhibited, they were called “freaks”. Now these same people are “misfits”. We have changed. With time, they seem less threatening, but boxed in. Like us they have made their lives, but unlike most of us they stand out while we tend to blend in. Through Arbus’ skill and the distance that time brings, we see the price that life extracts, if you believe that photography is a mirror. If photography is a pencil, then these pictures are a perspective, a honed point of view. In this show there are two pictures of crying babies. Terrified, overwhelmed and powerless. Arbus focused her camera and opened the shutter. This, like all the other pictures, was what she was looking for. She found it. Her vision. We, however, can not live with these pictures, only visit them in a museum. They are adept and arresting. We see her view of life and, fortunately, know where it leads.