Your Bus, My Bus, Arbus
by K.B. Dixon
I bought a copy of Diane Arbus, An Aperture Monograph—a 50th Anniversary Edition of the 1972 classic. I’m not entirely sure why. I have never gone out of my way to like (or dislike) Arbus’s work, but it seems lately I have been noticing an increasing number of admiring references to her. I thought a fresh look might be a good idea—a chance to see if I am missing something, a chance to see if my nascent impressions were preemptively callow or in some way prescient.
The Book
Released a year after Arbus’s suicide in 1971, the book plays a central role in DA’s subsequent fame. It became one of the bestselling photobooks of all time—which is one of the reasons the Arbus Foundation, under the autocratic rule of Arbus’s daughter Doon, keeps churning out new editions. A collection of 80 images, the book “represents photographic publishing at its most distinguished” according to critic Janet Malcolm. It is one of those photobooks that sits on a short shelf of designated “masterpieces” with Robert Frank’s The Americans and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. Its initial success, I think, is attributable to two things: the cover photograph of the Wade twins and the tortured-artist trope that is Arbus’s exculpatory biography.
The Twins
The cover photograph of seven-year-old twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade is one of the aesthetically strongest images of Arbus’s entire oeuvre. It has become a sort of calling card for the photographer. It is her Moonrise in Taos (Adams), her Stravinsky (Newman), her Winston Churchill (Karsh), her Dovina and the Elephants (Avedon), her Marlene Dietrich (Penn). The twins stand side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder in identical dresses with large white collars and matching haircuts. We are transfixed by the devilish duality of them. We immediately start looking for their differences. The twin on the left has the slightest of frowns, the one on the right the slightest of smiles. It is an image that insists on allegorical interpretation. It invites us to reflect on identity—on both its fragility and its persistence. It encourages critics to hyperventilate.
Style
The twins picture does what a cover picture is supposed to—it lures you into the book. It is, to a degree, misleading in what it promises—which is the accumulation of similar wonders. Arbus began her photographic career in fashion with her husband Alan Arbus before eventually wandering off into her own world of human oddities, people she called “freaks,” people who differed from the norm. An admirer of Robert Frank, et al., she adopted the snapshot aesthetic to which she added her fetishistic obsessions and an occasional fine-art glaze. As I don’t happen to be particularly fond of the snapshot aesthetic (with its condescending claims of a special sort of authenticity), I am not predisposed to be an enthusiast.
The Photographs
There are, of course, a number of very strong pictures to be found in this book—the opening image, for example, titled “Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C 1963,” which in its use of darkness, depth, and dwarfs is remarkably reminiscent of Diego Valazquez’s famous Las Meninas. And the nudist couple standing stiffly at the edge of the woods who appear to be an almost direct reference to Jan van Eyck’s painting of Adam and Eve. There are also, I am afraid, a few too many beehives, bawling babies, and headshot portraits that feel like precursors to Bruce Gilden’s cretinous street muggings. Then there are the headscratchers—photographs so ostentatiously ordinary you have to question their selection. Photographs like the pallet-cleanser titled “A house on a hill, Hollywood, Cal. 1963”—a moment of visual rest that allows your wonder to revivify before trudging on to Arbus’s most controversial course: her photographs from assorted mental institutions.
Sontag
Susan Sontag, the carefully quaffed critic to the stars, gave voice to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses of Arbus skeptics in a famous (or infamous) 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books titled “Freak Show.” “The most striking aspect of Arbus’s work,” she wrote, “is that she [Arbus] seems to have enrolled in one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises—concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. Her work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.” It is not just “the most striking aspect of the work”—it is the central problem of the work for me. It is the plinth on which the accusation of exploitation rests. Sontag saw the work as contributing to a moral and social desensitization. “Arbus’s work is a good instance,” she said, “of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible.” Her point is made, I think, if one looks at the reactions to Arbus’s work in 1971 (when it was widely characterized as repulsive) and compares it to the reactions today (when it is commonly praised as some sort of transgressive act of courage).
Malcolm
Critic Janet Malcolm, writing twenty years later, was more receptive—but she was not without her reservations. (It seems to be an enduring feature of the Arbus oeuvre—if one is receptive, it is always with reservations.) She took up the Arbus story in 1996 with a lauding essay titled “The Aristocrats.” In this essay she expresses her enthusiasm for Arbus’s work referring to it as “powerful new journalism.” The work may have been powerful (especially for its time) but, as Sontag noted in her time, it was not journalism at all. “However eager she [Arbus] was to disavow standard elements of photographic sophistication such as composition,” Sontag wrote, “Arbus was not unsophisticated. And there is nothing journalistic about her motives for taking pictures,”
Malcolm’s essay was not only focused on the Aperture Monograph, but on a second posthumous collection of the photographer’s work titled Untitled—a collection of 50-some photographs of the mentally undeveloped (eight of which originally appeared at the end of the Aperture Monograph). I think Malcolm had come to identify with Arbus to some degree. She saw her as a sort of fellow traveler—a practitioner of the journalistic dark arts of insinuation and betrayal. However uncertain Malcolm may have been about Arbus’s work, she remained enamored enough to be annoyed by much of the criticism. She was particularly bothered by A.D. Coleman’s essay in The New York Observer which had, among other things, disparaged journalistic dissembling (a touchy point with Malcolm as it was an important part of her journalistic practice). She characterized the Coleman piece as “peculiarly angry and completely misguided.”
I read the Coleman essay. He may have been riding a little high on his high horse, but I didn’t find the piece peculiarly angry or misguided. He refused to review Untitled for the Observer because he felt “that public presentation of [Arbus’s] imagery—a set of pictures of developmentally disabled people…exploits its human subjects”—exploits them in ways he found morally objectionable. The essential issue for him (in addition to some monkey business involving the surreptitious fattening of the monetizable legacy) was “consent.” “Given that the subjects of these photographs were all residents in institutions for what were then known as the “mentally retarded,” few if any of them had the capacity to give informed, meaningful consent regarding either the initial making of images of themselves or the subsequent public display of those images in publications or exhibitions.”
Five Years Later
When Malcomb returned to Arbus’s work some five years later with an essay titled “Good Pictures,” she seemed a little more conflicted. “If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition,” Malcolm wrote, “Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. Her photographs relentlessly tell us how interesting they are…” This was another part of my initial reaction to Arbus’s work. I have never been able to shake the feeling that her pictures were first about the photographer and getting attention, and last about the subject—no matter how ardently her supporters suggested otherwise.
Duck/Rabbit
When I think of Arbus’s work, I think of that famous duck/rabbit drawing that once obsessed the great Austrian enigma, Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is an illusory drawing illustrating a tricky philosophical question about the nature of reality—something Ludwig referred to as “aspect perception.” One person looking at the drawing will see a duck; another person looking at the same drawing will see a rabbit. When it comes to Arbus, some people will see a neurotic, attention-starved, exploiter of unfortunates while someone else looking at the same body of work will see a bold new journalist with a particular way of seeing the world.
I have thumbed through theAperture Monograph I don’t know how many times now and in spite of being momentarily hypnotized, I cannot detect any change in my ancient attitude toward the work. I remain what I was in the beginning—a milktoasty middle-of-the-roader. (I know Emerson said “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”—but remember, the guy was a mystical crackpot [see Over-Soul] who was banned from speaking at Harvard for 30 years after one of his lectures.) I remain reluctant to commit to either camp—pro-Arbus or anti-Arbus. To get on the bus or off the bus. I find myself leaning toward the latter, but not toppling over.
BIO
K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent book, The Dogs of Doggerel: Irregular Poems was published in Fall 2025. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collections, Artifacts, and My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.
