Just around the time that I received a copy of “Untitled” (Aperture; $50), a collection of portraits of the mentally retarded which the photographer Diane Arbus took during the last few years of her life, my nephew was committed to the psychiatric ward of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where his condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. Two policemen had “apprehended” him—a six-foot-four, thin twenty-seven-year-old with tawny-yellow skin and braces—on Central Park West at Eighty-third Street, where he stood, shirtless, throwing stones at passing early-morning traffic.
In the gray-green gloom of his hospital room, I watched my nephew’s eyes alight on my face; he showed the same degree of interest in my presence that he did in the patterns the sun made on the floor and in the plaster crumbling from the ceiling. He did not speak. In that silence, I instinctively put physical distance between us, and I realized that I viewed his illness as a form of vampirism, ready to overtake and drain my rational self. At the same time, I was repelled by my predatory fascination with his condition, my desire to rub away at the pain blanketing his face so that I could uncover his illness and see what it was like. I found it difficult to distinguish between who he was and what I was supposed to be in his presence. Back at home, I found myself looking at Diane Arbus’s “Untitled” as a kind of road map—a road map into the land my nephew now inhabited, where his eyes rolled upward as he contemplated things I couldn’t see at all.
It took Diane Arbus approximately a decade to become Diane Arbus, the photographer whose signature subject matter was the freaks, lowlifes, and other fringe groups against which most people define themselves as “normal.” Prior to her emergence as one of the century’s preëminent photographers, Arbus had been, besides a wife and mother, a child of privilege; she had grown up in a status-conscious environment that contained nothing representative of her internal world. “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity,” Arbus once remarked. “I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality. And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.” It was her sense of a visually ordered universe—where everyone had ten fingers and toes, where bodies and faces were capable of expressing hope and love and failure in all the habitual ways—that Diane Arbus turned from in horror. She preferred the darkness that flooded the travelling carnivals, crumbling hallways, and hotel rooms where leftover lives creep along the edges of our consciousness. In Arbus’s visual narrative of disenfranchisement, one can see her saying, “That’s the way it is.” And what’s more—a startling declaration coming from a woman artist finding her way in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—“That’s the way it is, and I like it.”
The harsh light Arbus levelled at her subjects—“A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970,” “Loser at a Diaper Derby, N.J. 1967”—was an indication not of a merciless vision but of her desire to enhance her subjects’ presence, which she considered “terrific.” Like Warhol, Arbus used the dumbest language possible to describe her work. As though she were a child always on the verge of rebuilding the universe through found objects—or found images—no language but the most rudimentarily joyful could describe the moment when she happened upon the signposts leading toward her self-expression.