October
17 , 2003
Front-Page
News
All in the Family Diane
Arbus: Family Albums,
an exhibition of the photographer’s work now on display
at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and its accompanying
catalog cowritten by MHC’s Anthony W. Lee have gained favorable
attention from the New York Times and the New
Yorker magazine. “The
creepiness of family ties, so uncertain and yet so binding, was
a theme throughout (Arbus’s) career, and is the connecting
tissue for a provocative show here at the Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum,” writes arts critic Richard B. Woodward in
the October 5 Times. “Family Albums (also the title of
the catalog from Yale University Press) is based on a book Arbus
whimsically proposed three years before her death in 1971 but
never developed, namely that her photographs as a whole might
be said to make up an enormous and unusual family album—in
her words, ‘a Noah’s ark’ of humanity.” Woodward
notes that the show contains “lots of fresh material,” including
the complete record of a previously undocumented family portrait
commission. “For scholars of Arbus, stymied since her suicide
by her estate’s iron grip on her work, the 322 unknown
images are a gold mine,” Woodward writes. “Never
before has it been possible to examine her photographic strategies
in such detail.” He concludes: “Arbus photographed
as though her subjects might one day be exhibits in a human zoo,
and the Mount Holyoke show contributes a few more endangered
species. Sadly, she never figured out where she belonged.” In
the New Yorker’s Books section, Judith Thurman
looks back on the photographer’s work and life. “Even before
her death, in 1971, Arbus was exalted as a genius and reviled
as a predator who conned her subjects out of their dignity,” she
writes. “The judicious books that accompany two new shows
give perspective to her intentions and, in the process, to her
character. Diane Arbus: Family Albums is the catalogue of an
exhibit curated by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz that is currently
installed at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley,
Massachusetts. An informative short essay by Pultz focusses on
specific work, and an erudite, longer one by Lee reconsiders
Arbus’s portraiture in the context of social and art history.” She
notes that the pictures Arbus took for her Family Album project “were
commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were
made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the
nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging
and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations
of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put
it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are
creepy in a way.’”
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