A photograph can change the world. Bring down the government. Change perceptions. This has happened more than once. This is what happened on June 16, 1976 when photographer Sam Nzima took the iconic photo of the Soweto massacres where police shot and killed students protesting against the apartheid policy in South Africa.
Nzima’s one photo of Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying a dying 12-year-old Hector Pieterson with Hector’s terrified sister Antionette Pieterson (now Sithole) running alongside him horrified the world when it was first printed.
A world that had mostly pretended the injustices perpetuated by a white ruling class in South Africa were not happening. The bloodied and lifeless corpse of Hector in anguished Mbuyisa’s hands was inescapable. Could not be wished away anymore.
Fence sitters who had sometimes argued that South Africa was better off in the “civilised hands” of the white minority could not mount a defence anymore with pictorial evidence of their savagery on front pages of newspapers around the globe. In 14 short years, a system that had lasted 42 years in South Africa crumbled. That is the power of a photograph.
Diane Arbus, the subject of Patricia Bosworth’s 1984 biography, was well aware of this power. Decades before people with mental or physical difficulties were treated more humanely or even looked at as “full” human beings, Arbus had made it her mission as a photographer from 1956 until her death in 1971 to “restore” their dignity. If not that, show them as human as the next man or woman, with their own personal joys and sorrows.
This approach shines through her last work called Untitled in which shot hundreds of photographs of persons with mental or physical challenges in New Jersey homes. Born 1923 in New York, USA, into a rich Jewish family of immigrants, Diane felt forced into silence from the start because she was born a girl and because of her family’s wealth.
She might as well have been the poor little rich girl of archetype which would later lead her to joke that she spent adulthood trying to out run her privilege. The subjects she found in these New Jersey homes shared a mirror fate of being “set aside” because of how they were born and ordered into silence. In her lyrical photos, she seems to be giving them back their voice and radiance as they dance, run, play and dress up in costumes for parties.
Bosworth is particularly good at showing how being born into privilege, “missing” the seminal experiences of her youth like the great depression of the 1930s that devastated the US and European economies, quizzically turned Arbus into an “outsider.”
This instinctively attracted her to what would be her photographic subjects when she picked up the camera after meeting the love of her life Allan Arbus when she was 14 years old. Diane Nemerov Arbus could sympathize with the “freaks” she met in circuses, theatre backstages and back alleys because they too were outsiders, pariahs of their time.
Arbus often said that for her taking a picture involved being brave because, “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” So this petite, tiny woman would go alone at dawn or late in the night into ghettos or seedy hotels or far flung towns to take photos.
Never sure she would be unharmed or return alive. Her “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970, 1970” crackles with this tension and power and no wonder her photographic style has been described as confrontational. Arbus focuses, in almost all her photographs, exclusively on the face. Searching in the lines and scars that make up that face for the person pulsating behind the suspicious eyes.
But Arbus was going beyond just taking these photographs. Again and again, she would say she never took a picture if she did not know the subject of her image.
While many other photographers at the time were content to “snatch” a face on the run in the street, Arbus would walk up to the person she wanted to photograph and talk to them. Seek their consent and in many instances, even go to their homes to learn more about them.
By the time she clicked the shutter of her 35mm Nikon, her twin-lens Rolleiflex or Mamiyaflex camera, the subject was an active collaborator with the photographer in the image being created.
Few photographs capture the inchoate rage children often feel towards the grown ups in their lives like Arbus’s “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962.” Many years later, the subject of that photograph Colin Wood would reveal that at the time Arbus took that photograph, his parents were going through a divorce and he did not know how to process the break-up of his family.
Diane Arbus: A Biography maybe the definitive work on one of the most important figures in the art of photography because Bosworth managed to speak Arbus’s family members, spouses, lovers and the people she photographed. Many of these people, now dead, speak candidly about Arbus’s prickly, vivacious and fascinating personality that she leaps out at you from the pages.
Read this book if you love photographs, take photographs or simply are looking for a great biography to read. Bosworth’s Arbus is a gem.
Worth Revisiting is a weekly column that will be appearing every Wednesday. The column explores past and present events that have shaped our world with a healthy dosage of context from politics, economics, arts and culture, technology to even forgotten scandals.