ARTbeat

Photographer Diane Arbus’ work from the 1960s shows that no matter how hard you try, there are enumerable ways to define family: words or pictures; parents and children; husband and wife; best friends, blood relations or marital vows; and overall, unconditional love. The concept of family is ever changing; since Arbus’ day the average age of marriage has risen and the divorce rate has skyrocketed. Through his confusion and ignorance our President believes that forbidding same-sex marriage will somehow protect the American family. New York University’s Grey Gallery explores issues of relationships through a combination of photographs by Arbus, which according to her are a type of “Noah’s ark, family album.”

A quarter of the exhibit is devoted to one Manhattan family. In 1969, Arbus spent two days with the affluent Matthaeis in their New York townhouse. During this time she made about one exposure every two minutes. She took 322 photographs of the family—father, mother, two daughters, one son—yet she hardly captured smiles. The eight or ten contact sheets of this session currently on view served as a flat flipbook. A resulting Matthaei narrative appears in segmented images of a family posed on various couches, seeming to feign intimacy. These frozen moments left me wondering what transpired in between the frames. Remembering that she took several hundred pictures of these five people, the final prints that hang with the contacts, allude to the type of story Arbus wants to tell and it is not a joyful one.

Numerous images of the two sisters reveal a brooding sadness and a learned detachment. The little boy, probably around age four, is the only one who shows what looks like genuine happiness. He is captured playing on a rocking horse and laughing in his father’s arms. Yet his relatives look so miserable that the viewer fears for the child’s future. He seems too young to know the difference, to be affected by the gloom in the room. It is no wonder that these sad images of the Matthaeis have not been shown before; it is not the type of family album that one would keep on the coffee table.

Arbus’ portraits are uncomfortable for both the subject and the viewer. She photographed people in their own environment—on their living room couch, in their backyard— with their own families, yet they look as though they do not belong there or anywhere. This unnerving contrast that characterizes the photos is true of both the photograph and photographed. When I stood back and looked at 10 or 12 of the photos together on a wall, I worried Arbus could locate this lost characteristic in any relationship. I wondered where she would place my parents. What about framing people with communal bond, with supposed unconditional love makes them so uncomfortable? Is it just as hard to define a family visually as orally?

Working for Esquire, Arbus received many assignments to take pictures of prominent and newsworthy people and their children. She photographed Madalyn Murray, who brought prayer in school to the Supreme Court, and her sons for whom she was fighting. Three pictures in the Murray’s kitchen appear in the exhibit. First, Murray poses by herself. In the second, nothing changes except the presence of one of the sons is added. In the third both mother and son hold their poses and the second son has joined them.

Relentless in her quest for understanding how family members—or just pairs and sets of people bonded—affect and dictate each other’s lives, Arbus forces us to look and ask what our relationships mean. With a portrait of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of JFK’s supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald… How did this woman’s choices lead to her son’s actions? What does that little smirk mean? I think Arbus was in the business of trying to answer questions with photographs.

Yet, for the most part, these responses are sculpted, crafted, and quite purposeful. Claiming a “family album,” her work is far from the impromptu, innocent shots that normally fall under this title. Consider, how she represents fathers. One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was her photo session with Bennett Cerf, the then president of Random House. The final prints, together with the contact sheets, tell the story of how the artist views her subject and how the subject reacted to her presence in his home. Although he smiles in almost every frame, he seems a stranger in his home or an actor on various stage sets, moving from the couch, to the arm chair, to the office recliner, to the breakfast table, to the corner, sometimes with a forced interest in a newspaper. These shots fall somewhere between a family man and a businessman; the roles are blurred.

Arbus sees people and their “family” inextricably intertwined. Is this not the truth? She annexes her subjects, lays her own sorrows on them and sees them in terms of her own unhappiness. In my eyes she allows her subjects to become her family.

Her own album tells a similar story. Arbus grew up in New York City, she and her husband Allan Arbus photographed for various publications. Allan and Diane separated in 1959. She ended her own life in 1971. She is survived by her daughters Doon, a curator, and Amy, a photographer. Both live in New York.