Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Last minute Diane Arbus


Empty movie theater 


 Clouds on screen at a drive-in movie




42nd street movie theater audience

 Self-portrait pregnant
This self-portrait was taken with her first camera her husband bought her this one for her birthday. It symbolizes the start of their professional collaboration.


Self-portrait with daughter Doom


 Family in Brooklyn, Nyc

 Dominatrix with her client

 Groom kissing his bride



 Flower girl at a wedding

 Girl in a watch cap
Her pictures of children reveal a poignant truth as if they knew something adults have lost, without wearing any social masks, facing life with innocent madness.

 Santa Claus bishop

 Seated man in bra
This picture and the one below remind be of religious icons.

Superstar at home.

 Blind couple in their bedroom


 Teenage couple on Hudson street
Probably the picture in front of which I stayed the longest. How old could they be ? They look so powerful and confident together. It's disturbing.


 Mrs Dagmar Patino at the grand opera


The 1938 debutante in her room



 Nudist lady with swan sunglasses (love this pair !)
For the exhibition closing I tryed hard to look like the old actresses Diane used to shoot with their duchesses furs but I maybe have mixed up with Peggy >here<

From october 18th, a blockbuster exhibition is on every mouth in Paris, the retrospective of the american photographer Diane Arbus at the Jeu de Paume. Yesterday was the last day and I was the last person of the thousands of visitors coming there since 5 months to exit it pushed away by the bouncers.

Approximately 200 photographs drawn from museum and private collections offered a sight on her most famous pictures but also on her unpublished works.

Arbus is famous for her clichés of the banged up America, its monster reality,and the mysteries of its banalities. Freaks, transexuals, child with grenada, these are all part of our collective memory and its impossible not to enjoy seeing them again but it was also the occasion to get acquainted with rare and previously unreleased works.

I was surprised to discover the spectrum of her work ( even if the layout of the exhibition was too smooth and polished, pics almost equal in both their presentation and put in very chic white frames !).
The series on circus reminded me a lot of Stanley Kubrick photographs Personalities of the circus I've seen at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Art, here are some examples.




 And the cinema series is the one I loved most because I think it is a metaphor of how she looks at life, dramatic and detached, through her camera lenses, watching passive audiences hypnotized by alienating characters.

The last two rooms were dedicated to her life, from her birth to her suicide with big quotes (she studied literrature and it appears obvious) I let you some with of them.

I see the divinity in ordinary things.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.


See also one of her photograph the albinos sisters at the Fiac >here<

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