Diane Arbus: Artist Rooms

I jumped at the chance recently to get over to Barnsley to catch the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Civic Centre. The show in South Yorkshire, commissioned in partnership with Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, features over 60 black and white photographs from the ‘Artist Rooms’ collection, including an opportunity to see A Box of Ten Photographs compiled by Arbus shortly before her death by suicide in 1971.

Arbus’ work shrugs off accusations from the likes of Sontag that the images are akin to a type of social slumming, collecting painful images and choosing to exploit the grotesque, ugly and unsightly actors of society in search of a confrontational and morally challenging freakshow aesthetic. Instead, it seems evident that Arbus’ images are positioned from a much more sympathetic framing, where Arbus herself appears present in the portraiture, capturing immensely intimate and fragile moments with an effortless ease and acceptance. Arbus’ portraits in particular pierce the veil of her subjects in a such a way as to feel as though you were encroaching on their personal space, maybe reading their diary entries, or were sat beside them while they penned their next entry. The portraits, as Alec Soth put it, are undeniable. The immediacy, the intimacy, the tension and then, the mental gymnastics an audience requires to wrestle with the implicit associations and cultural benchmarks that Arbus manages to sidestep with an almost oxymoronic subtle clarity. Diane Arbus seemed able to at once document the loud, proud and garish while simultaneously capturing the quietness and intimacy of a moment.

Earlier work on show, from the period before Arbus’ breakout 1967 ‘New Documents’ Exhibition at the [XXXXXXX] alongside XXXX and XXXX, presents itself in stark contrast to the square-framed, personal portraits of the artist’s later developed aesthetic, yet still pertains to a similar sense of the unusual and the uncomfortable. The morbidity of a pair of Siamese twins in jar at a circus sideshow, or the almost regally staged portraits of a headless man and woman, reflecting Arbus’ fascination with unsettling spectacles that challenge us.