the line, freakishly long. the show, the gratingly worshipful retrospective of the works of revolutionary photographer dianne arbus at the metropolitan museum.
i decided that when the crowds thin out, maybe by june, i would come back to confront the devastating photos themselves. but last weekend, i chose to dwell on the less mobbed biographical materials - hagiographical, i must say - that accompanied this triumphant exhibition.
from her well preserved letters, notebooks, books, keepsakes, dianne arbus, other than the pivotal figure in documentary photography that she was, was revealed to be a heartbreakingly beautiful writer as well. she was not the sister of the poet laureate howard nemerov for nothing.
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 on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw, she wrote.
and so she did notice them in monumental dwarfs, meditative transvestites, carny folks, nudists. mostly freaks.
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.
moving against the curatorially engineered flow of the crush at the exhibition, it came to me that i could have been a very good subject for her had i been around in new york before she committed suicide in 1971.
i've always carried this nauseatingly melodramatic cognition that i was born hurt, injured from something not of my own doing. and the original hurt continues to gnaw everyday in motley pains and moans.
the only photo in the exhibit i had the fortune to gaze at quite sufficiently was that of the naked man being a woman. stained curtains flank him. his penis hidden between his legs. his body traumatized by the marks from his brassiere and panties which he has just taken off.
i don't know how to see this picture. i don't even know what to think or feel about it. dianne said that a photograph is a secret about a secret. the more it tells you the less you know.
once outside the museum, everything seemed so commonplace, so hackneyed, so uniform. i felt no need to observe, to look, to watch. and i realize why people like her are great artists and people like i am can't even make a good shot at being a charlatan.
her pictures are calls, pleas, almost, to learn from this world of amazing, beautiful things. that if only our eyes are ready to recognize them, trauma, flaws, and all.
in a magazine article just months before her suicide, she wrote once i dreamed i was on a gorgeous ocean liner...…rococo as a wedding cake. there was smoke in the air. people were drinking and gambling. i know the ship was on fire and we were sinking slowly. they know it, too. but they were very gay. dancing and singing and kissing. a little delirious. there was no hope. i was terribly elated. i could photograph anything i wanted to.
and so she did.