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The Pain of looking

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The Pain of Looking

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
Is Diane Arbus’ work voyeurism, a celebration of humanity or something of a self-portrait?

A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 1966 by Diane Arbus.

Years ago I was on the aisle seat of a hot and crowded bus when a thick hand reached over my shoulder and attempted to grab the handrail. It missed and a large body awkwardly fell into me. The hand tried again to hit the button and failed. At which point, as I reached to press the button for them, I looked up to see heavy-set glasses on the soft face of a woman with learning disabilities. There was something about her obliviousness of her own vulnerability which almost made me weep.
When I look at Diane Arbus’ pictures I feel the similar pain of looking as I did on that journey home. I once visited Tate Modern when they had a room dedicated to her work and saw a human beauty that I felt had been hidden from me up to that point. It seemed that it was impossible for the work to be read any other way than gentle, empathetic and, yes, …soft.
Arbus has been accused of and reduced to many things. Susan Sontag thought her work was “based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is being asked to look at is really other.” But as Liz Jobey rightly asks ‘Why do we assume they are victims at all?’*
John Szarkovsky, on the other hand, considered her to be ‘celebrating human diversity’ when he included 30 of her images in his groundbreaking MoMA show New Documents in 1967. But isn’t that a bit simplistic and naĂ¯ve? It was Nan Golding who caught my attention in this videofrom the Genius of Photography (from about 08.30). I’m not sure I’d go so far as Goldin to say Arbus wanted to escape from herself (although her suicide gives good grounds for this speculation) but I can see the empathy she had for others and a natural propensity to be drawn towards their pain.

I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.  Diane Arbus

I do think it hurts to be photographed but I also think it sometimes hurts very much to look. So instead of seeing Arbus as an inflictor of pain, I see her as one who was pained.
As life goes on, and things happen, we start to realise we are all as weak as each other and there is a certain pain involved in looking at that. I think that’s what Arbus did best; by facing her self in the people she photographed, she made us look at our selves.
* In her in-depth essay on Diane Arbus’ picture A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 1966 in the book Singular Images edited by Sophie Howarth.


Posted by author: Sharon

27 thoughts on “The Pain of Looking

  • I really relate to this. Thank you for such a thoughtful, compassionate discussion. It’s the first OCA photography post I’ve seen that addresses the pain of looking and being ‘seen’.
    Can you recommend any other books that look at photographs from this perspective?

    • Thanks Stephanie. Sontag herself wrote Regarding the pain of others but it’s more about our numbness at looking at war pictures. Your comment reminds me of the VIctorians who prevalently thought a photograph stole your soul. Of course many cultures still think that today and provides an interesting take on the pain of being seen.

  • Would like to echo what Stephanie is saying!
    This post helps me to see Arbus in a different light rather than adopting the Sontag viewpoint.

  • Its an interesting viewpoint, but one I can’t agree with. I don’t think the evidence suggests Arbus had much empathy with her subjects at all. Arbus said that she felt a personal experience of detachment and that drove her to observe through the camera lens. But her eye wasn’t neutral: what she saw were the flaws in us all and she felt that the camera enabled her to see beyond how we present ourselves and show something more of who we really are. Thus for Arbus the photographic issue was not one of empathy but of stripping away the social, cultural and psychological pretences we all establish in our public personas and private lives and get to see the real person laid bare.

  • That’s the problem with viewer perception – a 360 degree perspective, within which maybe the photographer can still hide! Might it have been more honest for Arbus to say, “I feel such pain inside that I want to photograph others who I think also feel this pain. Then I won’t feel so alone”. I suppose the problem with that statement is that she herself would also be making an interpretation of her subjects that could well be wrong.
    You write of ‘obliviousness of her own vulnerability’ Sharon and, for me, that’s the key. What we see on the outside doesn’t necessarily reflect how the person feels on the inside and vice versa.
    I see the softness in that young family all dressed-up and ready to go – that used to be me once, at that very time but in a different place. I’m still not sure though that Arbus took the photograph with an empathic eye.

  • Being comparatively new to the critiques made by Sontag et al to the works of Arbus I have no wider comments to make on their relevance. Instead I am limiting myself entirely to a reading of this one image. The central photographic aspect of the image that leaps out at the viewer and I think provides the central message is the hand holding between the little boy and the man. It isn’t an aggessive hold, it’s one of sympathy and concern and it shows a commitment from one human being to another. The expressions on the adults’ faces are obviously open to interpretation, and it’s possible to read sadness and resignation there – but there’s also an affirmation of the human spirit. Commitment is clearly present. Bad things happen – they have to be dealt with. This family, at that moment, were doing that and it may not have beeen easy. What does this say about Arbus? I’m not sure. Whether or not you read voyeurism into this image says more about the viewer than the image maker. What I see in it is positive – it’s all in the holding of the hand and it’s shows what people can do for each other (even (especially?) if never wanted to be in that position). That’s quite a lot for a photograph to say, and I think that says a lot about Arbus

    • Beautifully put Rob. Yes, the hand holding gets me too.
      I should also make clear that Sontag goes on to offer a more thoughtful critique of Arbus’ work even mentioning empathy and compassion but it seems her view is in hindsight after her suicide rather than from the images themselves.

    • Yes, I get a strong sense from some of her subjects’ eyes and body language that Diane Arbus must have had a lot of personal warmth, even if this was not directly expressed. I was very struck by the picture of her i(n the clip you gave of The Genius of Photography) – I instantly recognised the presence of pain and awareness in those eyes.

  • Just a brief addition. I know nothing about Diane Arbus, and something about Ms Sontag. Perhaps it helps that I’m a bit ignorant here and I’m not concerned with trying to interpret the mind-behind-the-eye-behind-the-camera. I find the image used for this thread very poignant. The different things of each of these people have to carry and feel that they have to carry/hold (I feel no pressure to interpret that in gender stereotypical ways, just to begin by noticing it and then wondering where a full interpretation would take me). The focus of his gaze (camera) and hers (off-camera). The wall of hexagonal tiles behind them, in much softer focus than the family but nevertheless ‘there’. Her fake tiger skin coat lining, the soft collar of his coat. The different ‘holds’ of their mouths. What does the way he looks at ‘us’ and the hold of his mouth tells us about how he feels he belongs in this family scene. Is he acknowledging or rejecting something? Pushing something away? My own desire to keep on interpreting and halting, I hope, before I have had said things that are too remote from what we can actually see in this image…

  • When looking at any image our interpretation is solely the result of our own make up, personality and learning. We cannot know what the photographer felt at the time of taking the image unless we are told by the photographer and that is of doubtful veracity because we are all prone to rationalising the irrational after the event. Even more importantly we cannot know what the subject(s) of the image were thinking/feeling at the time.
    Their is a certain arrogance in ascribing to others the feelings that are invoked in us by a photograph and perhaps even greater arrogance in ‘describing’ the lives, feelings and responses of the subjects of the image. Remember we are revealing far more about ourselves when we describe a photograph than we are about anything or anybody else.
    The question to ask oneself is – “Why do I have the feelings I do when looking at this image?”

    • I am very much on sympathy with your view Cedric. However, the answer to your final, excellent question so very often involves matters of societal norms, dominant ideologies and so on even if the individual’s inclinations are in opposition to these. As Mr Donne had it. ” No man is an island, entire of itself..”

      • I don’t know Cedric, but I had assumed that he was aware of that when asking himself the question….I would be asking myself the same one…but the answer I would be looking for wouldn’t necessarily lie within myself. For me the whole concept of myself as an individual entity is a construction and so the answer might well lie in trying to unravel the complexities of societal expectations, and the urge to present myself to others as a “nice” or “ethical” person vs the possible dominance of some other inner necessity, such as an attempt to find some “truth” whatever that is.
        Of course that’s just me đŸ˜€

  • I am currently studying photography with OCA, and my particular field is Social Documentary, which is the category that this photograph would fit into so in some small way I can understand the thoughts of the photographer of this image, but yet it would not be one that I would be brave enough to take myself, there is a lot of pain shown in this image and the slight embarrassment on the look of the parents faces shows this. This is painful and no more needs to be said.

  • I don’t know if Arbus was consciously facing herself in the portraits she made. Having read her personal notes published in ‘Diane Arbus: A Chronology’ I don’t recall much evidence of her awareness of this. What is clear from these notes is that she spent a great deal of time with many of her subjects, in some instances going back numerous times. She cultivated relationships and gained the trust of the people she photographed. I personally don’t think that the way she photographed them betrayed her subject’s trust. She presented them as they were. As I understand it she often looked for a moment when what she called the ‘gap between intention and effect’ was apparent. She expressed this as ‘Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe’. This approach reveals people’s vulnerability and when I look at her work it is this feeling of awkwardness that strikes me and strikes a chord with me….I am constantly disappointed that the camera appears unable to capture the real me!! I also wonder if Sontag and others who criticised her work were simply reflecting their personal discomfort with and prejudices about the nature of the subject matter.

    • That’s a really good point Keith that puts it all into more perspective for me. Something happens in the interactions when spending more time with people and maybe that sometimes invisible connection manifests itself at the moment the shutter is pressed.

  • We are led to look for “Pain” by the caption “The Pain of Looking”. We are set the challenge, by Sharon, to regard the image for instances of Pain. If the caption had read “The Looking for a Loo” we might have had less opportunity to look for pain.
    I instinctively feel that any pain that is wrought from this image is as much our own pain/experience mirrored as any gleaned from these subjects.
    Goldin’s testimony is more nuanced than a single image whose narrative is like a sentence taken out of context, and, given the benefit of hindsight I would suggest we should look for more of either that self portrait that Sharon suggests or, more likely, our own.
    Another question: Why, might we ask, did Arbus print the image skewing to the left, or is this an ‘edited’ version for the purposes of the post?

    • Surely what Sharon is talking about is our pain when looking at images, the pain of recognition, of estrangement, of sympathy, of revulsion; generally the pain of having some emotions wrenched from us by the image. It is the difference between ‘LOOKING’ and simply seeing and passing on.

      • No doubts about that at all Peter. My point is about how Sharon’s comment directs us to look for Pain, rather than say for humour. If the supporting text had, for example, extolled the virtue of Arbus’ genius in finding humour in everyday situations, then our reaction, as an innocent to the image, would be perhaps to confer a different reaction to this image.
        I don’t doubt Arbus’ genius, but a troubling genius; that she presents her subjects as ‘Other’ for us to view has been the constant criticism. And inviting the reader to reflect their own selves into the narrative of the image, their own experiences, their own self-portrait perhaps (which I also note is a directive from Sharon).
        How we interpret an image is fed surely by the conditions prevailing at the time we are presented, as viewers, with the image (or indeed any work of art). That “construction” as Anne puts it above, is in a constant state of flux through investigation surely? And if so, then our reactions to her work (or perhaps any work of this nature) acts as a mirror to the viewer? So asking to look for Pain will reveal, to a great extent, our own pain. We reflect on ourselves in the mirror that Arbus and Sharon presents for us.

        • I think my “construction” is the better for reading Sharon’s comments though, its always a pleasure to read her weareoca items as a student I find it invaluable to hear what subject specialists have to say, particularly if they’re thoughtful, as its so enriching for the serious study of our discipline when engaged in distance learning.
          I do agree that we all see things differently all depending on our state of mind etc. But there’s also context to take into account, in this case there is Sharon’s article to give context but more than that there’s the entire Arbus catalogue that I’m guessing she is supposing many of us are familiar with – and that gives another kind of context for us to look at this one image. We look through the eyes of Arbus, and her body of work helps us kind of “construct” her from her photographs. So although you could look at this image in terms of a small boy wanting to go to the toilet, it would be difficult to look at the rest of her work in those terms. So for me although its a possible way of looking at it, I don’t think that reading is supportable in terms of the larger context, although I suppose you could argue that the painful insistence of bodily needs is part of the pain of human existence!
          I guess that I make the assumption that there is a driving force of some kind in Arbus’s work that makes it coherent rather than a series of random one-off images, and that might be pain. There is a pain in looking at people without that gloss of portraiture and possibly more so the more we see ourselves surrounded by airbrushed media imagery. So I can’t help but mentally look at the image and see the lack of a glossy cover-up and imagine I might be seeing the reality of human existence with all its problems laid bare.

  • I believe that the human condition IS painful, and that therefore it’s more a case of whether we believe we can recognise it and whether our own pain resonates with anothers’, rather than whether it actually exists to be seen. I think this is a very interesting grey area, and that questions and suggestions are more helpful than dogmatic answers.

    • “I believe that the human condition IS painful … ” well, yes, this is what the Buddha pointed out yet he also said more significantly, that this pain can be dealt with, transmuted, into something more sublime, transcendent – to believe in misery is to perpetuate it. Arbus committed suicide and so apparently failed in this respect … Sontag saw fit to pass comment on her work partly as a result of this.

  • “I do think it hurts to be photographed … ” this sounds a bit narcissistic! If it is true then why would you or any rational person want to take photographs?
    The pain that is perceived in the taking of a photograph seems to centre around vanity, an exaggerated view of one’s own uniqueness etc unless one has a good reason for not being photographed (e.g. one is sciving off work for a day, the spouse does not know one is with this other person etc)
    There is a big difference between imagined pain and actual pain … I don’t think it helps to confuse the two.

  • Voyerism, in the original sense of the word, meaning spying on person/s involved in intimate, sexual behaviour without them realising it is a very dubious thing. However, the meaning of voyerism has changed and is the main driving force behind reality TV. I don’t really see anything wrong with this kind of voyerism. Although I find reality TV tedious because of all the hype and suspense, voyerism can make for interesting art. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, but if you want to catch anyone off guard in a photograph then you have to be a bit of a voyeur, don’t you?

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