It was my second visit to the Diane Arbus exhibition that determined my choice of one her more famous (or even notorious) photographs for my assignment. I had come from my first visit with an uncertain mind; I did not feel comfortable with many of the images but I found, despite their flaws (see https://rodsblog2.wordpress.com/diane-arbus/ for my discussion of technical limitations) and the stark almost brutal depictions, that they captured my interest. It was not the images of transvestites or the ‘freaks’ that unsettled me but those of seemingly ordinary people caught by Arbus’s camera, like the Puerto Rican woman or two girls in identical swimsuits.
That brutal lens also captured a young boy in a New York park. Colin Wood was seven and was out with his nanny when Arbus photographed him. From the contact sheet for the session it is evident that Arbus circled the boy taking pictures while he stood on the pathway under the trees. In the photographs the verticals dominate emphasising the skinny boy in the foreground. The tones in the monochrome image are split with dark blacks and light greys and not much in the mid-grey region. The picture was taken on a sunny afternoon with the shadows of the leaves dappling the pathway. In the mid ground there are the figures of two women with a pram and small child approaching and behind the boy is the half hidden blurred figure of a woman in a dark coat. And dominating the whole picture is the figure of Colin Wood, arms thrust down, hands like upturned claws and in the left a toy hand grenade.
Colin Wood has spoken about the time when the photograph was taken. His father was a professional tennis player and his parents at the time were going through a difficult divorce; Colin was left under the supervision on his nannies and a maid, who fed him copious amounts of sugar. As can be seen in the photograph, Colin was not a robust child, he was sickly and asthmatic and he was an anxious child[1]. Arbus shot almost a whole roll of film (eleven exposures) when she came across the boy in a New York park. In all of the pictures, apart from the chosen one, Colin is clowning for the camera, hands on hips and smirking. Wood later commented that the photograph must have been a ‘collaboration’, that he must have been encouraged by Arbus to act up[2]. In the other exposures the boy is clearly posing for Arbus but in a much more playful way.
In his teenage years, Wood hated the photograph; it was maliciously displayed around his school by a fellow pupil and he was teased about it[3]. The photograph itself naturally creates unease in the viewer – it shows, after all, a child who appears to be in a distressed and agitated state. Arbus has been criticised, most notably by Susan Sontag for her ‘play with horror’, which included not only the ‘freaks’ as subjects but also more ‘ordinary’ subjects such as ‘Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark, NYC’, ‘Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C. 1966’ and of course the photograph of Colin Wood. Germaine Greer, perhaps, goes even further: ‘The emotion that thrills through every Arbus icon making them haunting and unforgettable is a relentless, all-encompassing loathing’[4]. Greer’s comments are, admittedly, coloured by a very uncomfortable session she had with Arbus but she does consider a number of Arbus’s photographs which she considers illustrate the photographer’s lack of empathy with her subject. Interestingly, it is not a photograph of a ‘freak’ that Greer describes in detail to support her argument but that of a more ‘ordinary’ subject, ‘Nudist Lady With Swan Sunglasses, PA 1965’. It could be suggested that Arbus was attempting an equivalence in her portraits of ‘freaks’ and ‘ordinary’ subjects, where the former appear more natural and the latter more extreme. If that is the case then the photograph of Colin Wood may be considered as evidence of Arbus deliberately seeking to uncover a rage and frustration within this young boy.
Arbus commented that in her work she was looking for ‘a gap between intention and effect’ and that ‘everything grownup is invented by children’[5] and this work supports both ideas. It was often Arbus’s working practice to push her subjects to a point of frustration where the mask falls and Wood has suggested that something like this possibly happened that day; the clowning poseur is for a moment transformed into a frightening scarecrow captured by Arbus’s camera. It is a dystopian view of childhood, a reminder that there is a potential for the malevolent in children, that they are not just the innocents we too often consider them be. Arbus’s photograph depicts a contrast between the skinny, underdeveloped boy dressed in neat prissy clothes and the raging figure with a hand grenade. It is unsettling, it is not what we expect but it is perhaps an image with a possibility, a vision of a child who might grow up like the perpetrators of Columbine. Fortunately, Colin Wood became an insurance salesman.
Her defenders have called her a ‘great humanist’[6], a proto-feminist usurping the male role of flaneur[7], and Arbus’s work has been lauded for its empathetic portrayal of people on the margins of society. Time and social trends change our assessment of her work and it is perhaps not the photographs of the ‘outsiders’ which are the most shocking now – as they certainly were in Arbus’s own time – but her other photographs of more ordinary subjects such as women and, in particular children. Photographs such as ‘Child teasing another, N.Y.C., 1960’ and ‘Fat girl yawning, N.Y.C. 1960’ are more unsettling in our time as they show children in an unflattering light, perhaps to remind us that in childhood are planted the seeds of our later adult faults.
Arbus’s photograph is not just a portrayal of Colin Wood; after all, the photograph chosen from the contact sheets was the one that differed most markedly from the rest, the one that showed subject at his most extreme, far removed from the boy just playing up for the camera. It was Arbus’s artistic eye that chose this picture as if she found in the image a warning of what our children might become.
[1] P257 Lubow, A. (2017). Diane Arbus : portrait of a photographer. New York, United States Ecco, An Imprint Of Harper Collins Publishers.
[2] Pictures, in (2019). Twins, etc. [online] Blogspot.com. Available at: https://pictureyear.blogspot.com/2008/08/twins-etc.html [Accessed 21 Nov. 2019].
[3] Pictures, in (2019). Twins, etc. [online] Blogspot.com. Available at: https://pictureyear.blogspot.com/2008/08/twins-etc.html [Accessed 21 Nov. 2019].
[4] Greer, G. (2005). Germaine Greer: Wrestling with Diane Arbus. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography [Accessed 21 Nov. 2019].
[5] P121 Lubow, A. (2017). Diane Arbus : portrait of a photographer. New York, United States Ecco, An Imprint Of Harper Collins Publishers.
[6] DeCarlo, T. (2004). A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus. [online] Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-fresh-look-at-diane-arbus-99861134/.
[7] amer4127 (2012). Notes from the Margin of Spoiled Identity – The Art of Diane Arbus (1988). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: https://americansuburbx.com/2012/07/diane-arbus-notes-from-margin-of.html [Accessed 22 Nov. 2019].
References.
Lubow, A. (2017). Diane Arbus : portrait of a photographer. New York, United States Ecco, An Imprint Of Harper Collins Publishers.
Sontag, S. (2008). On photography. London: Penguin Books.
Jerry Danziger: The Year in Pictures: Twins, etc.. 2019. The Year in Pictures: Twins, etc.. [ONLINE] Available at: https://pictureyear.blogspot.com/2008/08/twins-etc.html. [Accessed 22 November 2019].
Greer, G. (2005). Germaine Greer: Wrestling with Diane Arbus. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography
DeCarlo, T. (2004). A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus. [online] Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-fresh-look-at-diane-arbus-99861134/
amer4127 (2012). Notes from the Margin of Spoiled Identity – The Art of Diane Arbus (1988). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: https://americansuburbx.com/2012/07/diane-arbus-notes-from-margin-of.html [Accessed 22 Nov. 2019].
Lane, A. (2019). Diane Arbus’s America. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/diane-arbus-portrait-of-a-photographer [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019]
Selwyn-Holmes, A. (2009). Boy with Toy Hand Grenade. [online] Iconic Photos. Available at: https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/boy-with-toy-hand-grenade/ [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
O’Hagan, S. (2011). Diane Arbus: humanist or voyeur? [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/26/diane-arbus-photography-sideshow [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
Telegraph.co.uk (2016). Incest, suicide – and the real reason we should remember Diane Arbus. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/photography/what-to-see/incest-suicide–and-the-real-reason-we-should-remember-diane-arb/.
Segal, D. (2005). Double Exposure. [online] Washingtonpost.com. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051102052.html? [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
Photographs Referenced.
Two Girls in Matching Bathing Suits, Coney Island, NY, 1971
Fat girl yawning, N.Y.C. 1960
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