Read and reflect upon the chapter on Diane Arbus in Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs by Sophie Howarth (2005). This is out of print but you may be able to find it in your local university library: some of the chapters are available as pdfs online. You’ll find the Arbus chapter on the student website. If you haven’t yet read any of Judith Williamson’s (2014) ‘Advertising’ articles (see Introduction to Context and Narrative), now would be a good time to do so.
The first sentence of the article- ‘The fictions we make about photographs are as unreliable as they are unavoidable’ is key to understanding many of the points that follow and helps set the scene, although when I read some of the descriptions of the couple in the image I would argue that the fictions Jobey creates could well be avoided.
The article starts off by making sweeping generalisations about the couple, subjective and almost gossip in tone. It is all ‘connotation’ and reveals as much about the viewer, Liz Jobey, her background, culture and even sociological positioning-middle class, educated and prejudiced- than the family in the photograph of whom we get some facts; married at sixteen, two children, one with cognitive disabilities-Richard Jnr, and a girl-Dawn. His name is Richard, is a car mechanic, hers is Marylin-people tell her she looks like Elizabeth Taylor and she dyes her hair black to make her look Irish- we are not told why or if Diane Arbus even asked.
Armed with these ‘facts’ and the accompanying photograph the viewer can interpret and make judgement. What it tells me is that even with the tools of interpretation to deconstruct a photograph, the cultural and personal worldview of the viewer (as well as the context) plays a big role in how a photograph is both interpreted and perceived. The photograph as a document of truth (reality) goes out the window. Even if we try to interpret and decipher a photograph like this, the fact that its from Diane arbus lends it an air of expecation-we expect the couple to flawed or somewhat socially marginalised.
To be fair to Jobey, after her introduction (devil’s advocate?) she does settle down and try to deconstruct the photograph and its context and raises some important points. She mentions that Arbus’s subject matter (midgets, giants, drag queens,-people who lived on the edge of society) and the way she photographed them opened up debates about ‘the nature of the encounter, and the motivation of the person behind it’. She digs into Arbus’s thinking and what she looked for when photographing people:
‘Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone in the street and essentially what you notice is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should be given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like living a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect…..But the camera is a kind of licence. A lot of people want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.’
As Arbus fame grew and more and more galleries bought into her unique version of voyerism, her approach didn’t go totally unquestioned leading Liz Sonntag to comment:
‘What is actually their aggressiveness towards the public has been treated as moral accomplishment’
We start out with a photograph of a family, and it opens up a narrative based on culture, worldview, societal norms, politics, intention, family snap versus family reality…it opens up the malleability of photography and its layers of meaning, and as Joby describes above, ‘fictions’. However, how easy we give into these fictions is under our control if we want it to be. We don’t have to buy into the world view of Arbus or any photographic academic gleefully deconstrcting and reconsructing images to fit onto an intellectual narrative. We could just take it at face value and see it as photo of a family, of the time and suspend any judgement. We could but the fictions are unavoidable it seems.
Finally, I can’t help feeling how the couple in the photograph felt about what was written about them, their children and their circumstance. Were they aware that they had become part of Diane Arbus’s oeuvre of photographs of marginalised, strange and socially awkward people? How did they feel about that? How did they feel to have people stop and stare and talk about you without any real context but a sliver of time caught on film and released into the world for all to judge?
Seemingly after the photo was taken they jumped into their car to go visit one of their parents-hopefully they never looked back.