January 19, 2006
Adam Phillips on Diane Arbus
As far as I can tell, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is considered a public intellectual in England, where he is well known for books such as On Flirtation, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, and, most recently, Going Sane; as a wide-ranging essayist; and as the editor of a new series of translations of Sigmund Freud. Going Sane received a bit of a media push when it was published Stateside last October, and I hope it will draw to him a larger audience on this side of the Atlantic. (So far I haven't seen his name pop up in US-based journals, though of course these things take time.) I appreciate his essays, which I've read in the London Review of Books for the past few years, for the plain fact that he not attempt to become what he isn't (an art critic, a literary critic); his recent review of Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park was among the oddest, and most fascinating, I read. In the current issue he has published an essay (unfortunately only fully accessible online to subscribers) on Diane Arbus's motives that closely follows her writings rather than her photographs. It doesn't serve well as art criticism, but nonetheless is a nice coda to the Arbusmania that gripped New York at the time of her exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum last spring. A few excerpts:
When Arbus speaks of her work she often enough talks of photography as a form of sociability: ‘Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it.’ The camera gives the photographer something to do with other people, and it is like a safe lead, a ‘licence’ as she calls it, into the unpredictable. Who you can and can’t be with for Arbus is bound up with what you can and can’t know about people. As a certain kind of modern artist she thinks of intentions as passwords that get you what you never expected; and she locates the mystery that matters most to her in the unfamiliar (the family being the place where unfamiliarity begins) . . .
[In discussing the freaks she encountered in Washington Square Park in 1966] Arbus is quite clear that here she has reached her limit, the horizon of her ambition: ‘I could become a million things. But I could never become that, whatever all those people were.’But what you can’t become you can photograph: you can get close to. And the way to get close to them is to ask them for something. If you ask someone for a photograph of themselves you are asking them to give you one, not to let you take one. Arbus – for some reason she doesn’t need to articulate – wants to get close to these people ‘whatever they are’, and the way is to ask to photograph them – words for pictures. But what does that make the photograph? If the camera is an ice-breaker – a way of having something to do with these people who she could never become – what is the picture a picture of? If we take Arbus at her word, the pictures are of an impossible aspiration: ‘I could never become that, whatever all those people were.’ They are records, or reminders of a thwarted closeness; of where sociability stops. You can’t be, or really be with these people; and this is where the photography, the work comes in. . . .
Arbus, quite rightly, is keen always to remind us that the photograph is not in any simple sense its subject; it is its so-called subject re-presented, recognised in a quite different medium. And, clearly, to talk about photography is to talk about this difference in new ways because photography appears to be so effortlessly mimetic. ‘What I’m trying to describe,’ she says, ‘is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.’ Perhaps the thing one is most left out of is other peoples’ traumas, other peoples’ tragedies. You don’t need a photograph of a freak, or indeed to photograph a freak, to tell you that you are not a freak yourself. So what, to ask the pragmatic question, are Arbus’s photographs of freaks for? Why photograph them, and why photograph them like that? . . .
If Arbus was drawn to the impossibilities of closeness then it is tempting to suggest that her photographs at once record this impossibility and try to break it down. Eudora Welty remarked that Arbus’s work ‘totally violates human privacy, and by intention’, as though Arbus couldn’t bear, or more interestingly didn’t trust, the privacy of others. As though privacy was some kind of mystification; as though the opaqueness of ourselves and others was becoming sacralised. Welty was over-stressing something – violation tends to be total; no one talks of feeling a bit violated – that is important about Arbus’s work, though it may be truer to say that Arbus’s work more often shows us how inviolable modern human privacy is: however close or close up you get, you never get that close.
UPDATE: This Saturday's Guardian published this edited extract of Phillips's introduction to the Freud Reader.