(Note: In early October of 1995 I published what I considered a provocative response to the monograph Untitled (Aperture), a posthumously selected set of images she'd made in homes for the developmentally disabled just prior to her death. Shortly thereafter, I posted that essay at this site, creating also a message board to enable response thereto. [This essay, and some related material, has moved to the Photography Criticism CyberArchive.]
As you'll see if you read my 1996 "Founder's Lecture," the level of response my Arbus essay evoked on that message board disappointed me gravely. Mostly it seemed like what I'd expect from people who hadn't really considered the principles involved or given the subject much deep thought and were kicking it around desultorily over beer and hot wings on a slow Tuesday. Little of interest to me, and nothing I feel obligated to sponsor and facilitate henceforth. After a few months I took the message board down. However, I did want to encourage and make possible serious, meditated response to the issues raised by the material I post. So, toward that end, I created a Correspondence section, from which I have derived the following two missives, plus my response to the second one. -- A. D. C.)
From Colleen Thornton:
Sent: 4/18/98 6:31 AM
From: Colleen Thornton
To: A. D. Coleman
The recent public events in the USA, which have exposed to the world just how "immature" American society still is, underlie the problem which A. D. Coleman addresses in his criticisms of the posthumous publication of Diane Arbus's work. As a culture, it appears to the Europeans that Americans are trapped in a mode of either adolescent or parental behavior & attitudes. But the stage of life called "adulthood" seems to be strangely absent. Perhaps because with the mantle of adulthood comes responsibility and liability; consequences rest exclusively in our own hands. And credibility is established or destroyed by the way we handle the results of our actions. Arbus was a responsible artist and, although a troubled individual, she did not shirk her responsibility to the people she photographed. She operated within the legislated legal perameters of her time and treated her subjects with professional/curatorial respect. Not so her heirs.
The laws have changed. Legislated Human Rights have evolved to include the excluded -- the very people she chose to so effectively call our attention to. When I saw the Arbus Retrospective at MOMA shortly after her death, I was deeply moved. I WILL NEVER forget any picture. The artist's statement, made by her eyes, hands, heart and mind, should stand as DEFINITIVE. Less IS more!
I think Coleman is right. The only reasons to OVER-RIDE the ARTIST'S RIGHTS are PROFIT and personal ambition. Let's face it, Arbus is now in exactly the same helpless position as the people in her pictures. Her empathy infuses her work with power and truth. But the dismissal of the artist's explicit wishes, the negation of her professional judgement and the commercial exploitation of these previously unpublished images just serves to underline the hypocrisy, duplicity, prurience, elitism and cultural RACISM, not only of the Art World, but of American society at large. The Father of our nation, Thomas Jefferson, knew what an uphill battle he was fighting when he wrote the words which formed the republic. The battle is WAY FAR from being won. I commend Coleman for telling the truth, even if nobody is listening.
med venlig hilsen,
Colleen Thornton
American Visual Artist
Copenhagen, Denmarkt
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Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 13:07:58 -0800
To: A. D. Coleman
From: O Willey
My dear Coleman,
I have read your article about Aperture's version of Diane Arbus, and like everything I have read of yours (the first sensible book on photography I ever read was your Light Readings), it certainly warrants the response you judiciously request.
Let me state that I do very much admire Diane Arbus. I do think she is an extraordinary image maker, even if one is restricted as you suggest to the five dozen photographs of her oeuvre. Though certainly not original in strategy, Arbus's work is, I think, extremely powerful. Not merely because she popularized a very specific sense of the grotesque in photography (deriving more than partially from Weegee, certainly), but also for her sense of composition and subject matter. Arbus brought a limited but extremely sharp I [sic] to photographic history.
The issues in your article, "Why I'm Saying No To This New Arbus Book," warrant attention precisely because I do think Arbus is a major photographer. I am fairly sure that your argument is not specifically about Diane Arbus so much as it is about: the implied relationship of subject and photographer; the responsibility of art itself, and of its constituents; and issues of representation.
This is obviously difficult material to argue reasonably.
I dissent with your definition of oeuvre. I do agree that the work an artist has specifically and deliberately chosen to publish holds the highest importance. It is, after all, called publication because it is made public, and therefore for public inspection and critique. But, as Georgieff says, this would hardly account for Kafka or Dickinson or Van Gogh or various other artists in varying degrees, nor would it account for the literary status of writer's notebooks, such as those of Henry James or Chekhov. But this merely makes the issue that much more complex.
For instance, Arbus's oeuvre would have to include her commercial work. I do not think it tenable to separate her published commercial work from her published "art" photography. It is, after all, published, made public. And if you separate those photographs out, then I suggest equally you go back to the work of Bach, Michelangelo and Bernini and separate out their commercial work, i.e. that work done on commission--the equivalent of working for a corporation in our own time. The Magnum photographers would equally fall into this category.
There is more to an oeuvre. An artist's heirs and publishers help determine that oeuvre. Unpublished work was not necessarily meant to be unpublished, but remained so by the whim of a publisher, or lack of an audience. I will return to Kafka, since Georgieff brought up the subject. Kafka's oeuvre would be very small indeed, by your standards -- one book, in fact. And William Henry Jackson, if you removed his non-commissioned work from the canon, would be a minor photographer at best, as would Robert Capa. The difference is always one of artistic purpose.
Publishers and executors play a role in this process of making artists' work public as well. And there we come to another problem: publishers and executors do not often see themselves as part of the artistic process, and therefore act irresponsibly--not unlike audiences, for that matter. Their motives are often more questionable than the artists'.
You suggest that Aperture might be pursuing a mere pecuniary goal with their publication. Well, my generation may be a bit more cynical than yours. I find that obvious. Of course they are. That's what publishers do. They are businesses and businesses are amoral in theory as well as practice. Surely there's no dearth of material on that subject.
This in no way excuses them, of course. But one must expect it. News magazines don't publish Haas or Erwitt photographs because they are great art; they publish them because they can be put to any purpose with the addition of text -- even completely at odds with the artist. All that one needs is the addition of text (cf. Berger, Ways of Seeing) and the illusion is complete. This is the political use of photography.
One of the main failings I sense in your ausstellungskritik is that you draw way too much attention to Arbus herself, instead of to Aperture. I'm guessing a certain amount of that is because you don't like her, and a snipe like "sixty images is hardly enough to warrant a major international reputation" simply baits the Arbus-worshipper you decry, even when posed rhetorically. You go quite a way into your essay before you bother to give Arbus even the limited defense you do.
Neither I nor you know whether the published photos would have met Arbus's standards for publication. She did, as you say, have a certain moral responsibility. You suggest that she may have breached it. You may be right. I suggest that she was working perfectly within her natural inclination to examine the insides of the wards for the mentally deficient. I equally suggest that Arbus's own psychological state during the years she was taking her photographs provides a necessary context you leave out. (There are only so many words in an article, I know.) I have no idea what her final decision may have been, and I'm sure that even her daughter--especially her daughter--has no real idea. But she can smell money as readily as the next heir apparently.
The other issue of representation is always a bane. First off, I hate amelioration in language, and I despise the entire semantic trend in ameliorative language. "Partially sighted" "differently abled," "ninety years young," and similar phrases nauseate me. They hide what I think are unpleasant but necessary truths: people are fragile, some people are crippled, people do get old and die. Developmentally disabled is equally to me an evasion. I could just as easily ask, "Whose standards for development?" and accuse the user of patronizing, but that would be a separate digression.
The one thing that direct language does do, however, is that it makes a clear impression and forces the recipient to question the other's motive. God knows how many times I've been called a spade by various parties, but when my friends say it or other African-Americans say it to me, I don't take offense because I understand it's merely a recognition of who I am. With people I don't know, I am more suspicious. It's not the word, as George Carlin noted, it's the racist using it that worries me. At least when the language is direct I needn't dig too deeply to divine the person's intention, and I much prefer that to a subdued, latent bigotry.
Photography does constitute a language, and this is therefore a germane point. Arbus's use of photographic language has always struck me as direct, and not ameliorative. If anything, it is confrontational. I don't think she ever tried to represent anything peculiar, warped or eccentric for her own ego. I think she did as she did because she thought people could not see the deformity and defect in their own so-called normal lives. Granted, she has gone overboard on occasion but I think from a sense of righteousness, not of vanity. Mild excuse, to be sure, but a distinctly different level of thought.
Arbus's direct language in her photographs does allow one that much, at least. It's often a litmus test. Who knows? The inmates of the wards may have appreciated a great photographer taking pictures of them, just as the prisoners in Soweto appreciated Sue Coe's propaganda pieces X and How to Commit Suicide in South Africa. Again, no one will know that, shy of personal accounts from the inmates or a seance's revelations.
How Aperture and Doon Arbus chose to use Diane Arbus's photos is the real issue at hand. I quite agree they are remarkably irresponsible. But then, money is involved. I hope someone decides to sue them just to make the point; a moral victory is just as good as a legal one, if more limited. Truly, photographic subjects should and must have some say in how their images are used. Fame and defamation, status and libel are things that photography easily, if unrightly, confers upon its subjects. This is part of the problem of the relationship between the subject and the photographer, as the "Zapatista Position Paper" [a commentary by Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, formerly posted in this newsletter and now included in the Photography Criticism CyberArchive] elegantly shows.
It is irresponsible for a publisher not to know this, and not to act accordingly to uphold the principles of the artists they publish. And in the absence of the artist, at least to obey basic common law. If publishers, editors, executors, heirs and audiences are all responsible for the oeuvre of an artist, all of them need to be proportionally responsible for their roles. Aperture, I think, and certainly Doon Arbus have failed badly at that.
I know this is unedited and a wee prolix, but I hope it satisfies at least a small bit of the need for public discourse. You know it's hopeless, don't you? But keep on, anyway. :)
Cheers,
Omar Willey
Publisher/Editor, Lines of Sight
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"Prolix and unedited" perhaps, but probably the single most reasoned and temperate response the Arbus essay has yet evoked.
A few clarifications:
Disagreeing with my definition of the oeuvre or body of work doesn't suffice. I think that, in any useful debate, one thereby undertakes the responsibility of proposing an alternative, and I don't find one here. Is it everything the artist ever lays a finger on? Everything we eventually get our hands on, by hook or by crook? If so, the term is meaningless. From this letter I can't tell what the author would exclude from that definition.
I myself would not exclude Arbus's (or anyone's) commissioned and/or commercial work from their oeuvre -- though I would want to annotate and maintain whatever distinctions between those the artist made during his/her lifetime. (Which means that I wouldn't insert one of the pictures Garry Winogrand made for a corporate report into a show of his "personal" work without careful annotation, and explanation of the reason for including it in that context.) I'd also distinguish between commissioned work and commercial/custom-tailored work: There's certainly a difference between, let's say, a symphony commissioned from a composer by an orchestra, which will presumably have little or no say over the style, mood, or content of that piece of music, and an advertising jingle commissioned from the same composer with its qualities largely dictated by the client. Unless the artist in that case made no distinctions between the two kinds of works, I wouldn't feel entitled to play them back to back at a concert representing his/her music as if they were one and the same. Which doesn't mean I wouldn't play them; but I'd have to distinguish between the two to my audience.
However, both those compositions -- if finished, approved and made public by the composer -- would thus become part of the body of work; nothing in my essay argues for the exclusion of any of that from the oeuvre. The same holds true for material the artist wanted to publish but couldn't, for whatever reason; this too is part of the body of work, as I make clear.
What then of the occasional case of an artist who withholds his/her work from publication while alive, like Emily Dickinson, or who actually orders its destruction, like Franz Kafka? These are exceptions to the rule, and I don't believe in building rules around the exceptions to them. Fact is, Max Brod violated Kafka's explicit instructions by publishing his work posthumously, and while on one level we can feel gratitude for its preservation we must also recognize that the rule proposed by Brod's actions profoundly disenfranchises artists in all media by prioritizing the audience's appetites over the maker's wishes.
Writers' notebooks, like artists' sketchbooks, photographers' negative files and contact sheets and workprints, and all such artifacts that are by-products of the creative life, constitute important study material. Depending on the significance we attach to a particular artist, we want (appropriately, I think) the ability to refer to and scrutinize such material in our efforts to understand not only the artist and the work but the creative process that engendered it. Such material often merits preservation. But it should never be presented publicly as if it were finished, approved, redacted work, as was the case with Aperture's version of this Arbus project.
In the specific case of Arbus, let me reiterate that I didn't know her personally, hold no grudge against her or her estate, and had no snide intent in asserting that "sixty images is hardly enough to warrant a major international reputation." I simply stated what I consider a fact. Let me also add that I'm not alone in my argument for excluding some material from the body of work. Here's photographer Thomas Roma on that subject:
"As a photographer, I understand just how crucial a role in photography editing plays. After pictures are taken, a photographer must make a series of critical decisions, starting with looking at contact sheets and choosing which images to make into 'proof prints.' (A proof print is a kind of rough draft of the final, finished photograph.) The next decisions are even more important: Which of the proof prints should be made into final prints, and thereby become part of one's body of work? (Italics mine.) The photographs must meet self-imposed standards. Most photographers agonize over these choices.
"The question is not simply whether a picture is 'good' in some formal, technical sense, but, Does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices." ("Looking Into the Face of Our Own Worst Fears Through Photographs," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 1997, pp. B10-11.)
Unlike Roma, I'm not even convinced that the making of final prints defines the image as part of the body of work. I've now spent three decades observing and listening to photographers. I know a great many who've taken a project even into final-print form, lived with privately for awhile, and then decided it just didn't work. They may not have destroyed those prints (and few destroy even their most failed negatives), for the same reason that a writer might not trash a shelved novel: maybe there's something to be salvaged from it, or at least a useful lesson to learn by returning to it periodically and contemplating its failures. So the survival of a work, even in apparently finished form, does not clearly indicate the maker's commitment to it. What does indicate that is the publication or preparation for publication thereof. Keep in mind that her biographer, Patricia Bosworth, has written that in her final days Arbus was disheartened and deeply dissatisfied with the results to date of her work on this particular project.
I don't propose in my essay that Arbus breached legal responsibility, or even moral responsibility, in making these pictures. So far as I could tell from the restricted information provided, she did not sneak into these institutions or make the pictures surreptitiously; she obtained whatever minimal permissions were then necessary. The breach of moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that concerns me is that of the estate and the publishers. As for the subjects of the photos "appreciat[ing] a great photographer taking pictures of them," there's no reason to believe that any of them knew who Arbus was, what reputation she had, that photography (circa 1970, remember) was beginning to be considered an art form, etc. This, and the comparison to Sue Coe's muckraking polemics on racism, strike me as specious, the weakest part of the above commentary. These were not persecuted people in dire straits to whose plight Arbus was drawing attention; keep in mind that she chose not to publish these pictures because they didn't satisfy her -- hardly the behavior of the investigative journalist -- and that nothing in any of the images even suggests that they're oppressed or endangered by their treatment.
Finally, regarding language: As I said in my response to Mark Power, language surely shapes the way we think, and changes in nomenclature lead to differences in perception. And there's a difference between description and judgment. Much of what Mr. Willey calls "ameliorative language" seeks not to prettify reality but to rectify the prejucial denotations and connotations built into many words that for decades, even centuries, were taken as purely descriptive, to the detriment of those so described. It wasn't until we stopped calling them cripples and gimps that the Special Olympics began and we learned that a lot of those people had physical skills and capacities way beyond yours, mine and Mr. Willey's. It wasn't till we stopped talking and thinking about wheelchair-bound paraplegics as drooling geeks that it became possible to recognize the genius of Stephen Hawking. And one was unlikely to recognize a roomful of pure musical genius if one saw a bunch of jungle bunnies onstage instead of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
In my lifetime we've gone through colored, Negro, Black/black, African-American and Mr. Willey's unhyphenated preference, African American; and the inclusion or exclusion of that hyphen is itself controversial. Given the still-unresolved debate among people descended from forcibly expatriated Africans in this country over the political implications of their options for official nomenclature, I'd expect someone of the melanin persuasion (sorry -- couldn't resist) like Mr. Willey to recognize the value of the change in labelling -- and to recognize that (George Carlin notwithstanding) the racist is to no small extent created and constructed by the existence and pervasiveness of the language of racism.
By the same token, the person who believes that Arbus's subjects have no rights in this situation may well have that attitude reinforced by the vocabulary of "retardation." Keep in mind that Janet Malcolm -- who approves wholeheartedly every aspect of this Arbus project -- explicitly says she actually longs for the day when we could call them "feeble-minded." I'd suggest there's a logical connection there; and, since I'm hardly noted as a regular rider of the PC bandwagon or an aspirer after trendiness, I'd hope my readers would look elsewhere for my motivation for this semantic choice and at least give me credit for choosing those words with the same care and precision I devote to such choices throughout my writings, for the same purpose: to shape and change my own consciousness and that of my readers.
Mr. Willey's concluding paragraph, in which he acknowledges and supports the priority of the rights of Arbus's subjects over the estate's, the publisher's, and the audience's, I find admirably unequivocal, as I do his overall commitment to reasoning out a principled position on things. May this set a tone for the dialogue to come.
