To the Editor:

It is good to see photography being taken seriously in your pages, but Richard Schickel’s “The Art of Diane Arbus” [March], interesting as it is, seems to me seriously misleading in certain ways. Since photography is not only an art but, when rightly apprehended, one of the most humane of the arts, this seems to me a matter of some importance.

Mr. Schickel’s division of photography into “two major traditions. . . , the salon tradition . . . [and] photo-journalism,” is either simply untrue or else involves a remarkable divergence from what I had always assumed was the informed consensus. When he says, “About the former tradition, the less said the better. . . ,” it is hard to believe that he can be referring to the work of artists like Eugene Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and others. But it is equally hard to believe that if he knew their work and took it seriously, he could have spoken as he did or attributed the kind of breakthrough importance to Arbus that he did. The actuality is more interesting than that.

Unfortunately I have been able to see only one or two examples of the work of Lisette Model, Arbus’s teacher. But in any case it is obvious that a substantial number of the pictures in the Arbus book are essentially developments of work done by Robert Frank in his very influential The Americans (ca. 1958), just as Frank’s work in turn represented a development not only of work by Henri Cartier-Bresson and, I would guess, Dorothea Lange but also of work in Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), which in its turn involved a development of work in Atget, Photographe de Paris (1930), edited by Berenice Abbott. Arbus was obviously also familiar with Evans’s and Atget’s work herself, as well as with the austere frontality of Strand’s portraiture and the experiments with “snapshot” composition of Callahan. In saying all this I am making approving, not adverse, judgments. I am pointing to a tradition, a line of development, in which intelligent and very gifted photographers learned from predecessors and used their understanding to produce images that were still brilliantly their own. . . .

Arbus was not in the least an eccentric genius who “turned her back on professionalism, on all the established notions of what constituted a proper aesthetic for a serious photographer. . . , her style . . . no style in the conventional sense, her technique no technique at all.” She was a highly sophisticated craftsman, with a brilliant sense of composition and, if the evidence of the book is reliable, a keen interest in printing, at times to the point of mannerism. There are in fact fewer than fifteen pictures in the book that answer to Mr. Schickel’s use of the term “snapshot.” And even though among them are most of the beautiful and very moving pictures of the mentally defective, it would be a woeful mistake to see pictures like these—so easy to mimic formally and so impossible to follow in terms of feeling—as being the “real” contribution of Arbus and the one that young photographers should try to emulate.

I will add that it is not, I think, a mere interest in the macabre that has led people to see Arbus as the portraitist of the eccentric. Dominant in the book, to my eyes at least, are those images of dwarfs and witches and magic-workers and giants and princesses and enchanted castles that embody so vividly the fairy-tale terrors and excitements of an imaginative childhood. In contrast, the photographs of “normal” people seem to me, pace Mr. Schickel, to be informed for the most part by a barely concealed contempt for, and perhaps fear of, people who think they are being interestingly different but who are in fact merely ugly and tatty. To see what respecting the dignity of ordinary people really looks like, Mr. Schickel’s readers might consider the work of artists like Atget, Strand, Evans, and Lange. And I would surmise that part of Arbus’s tragedy was that she was not sufficiently interested in social contexts, in the way that those others were, or as Frank was, to be able to bridge the gap between the childhood wonder of the extraordinary and the banality of the everyday and to see the wonderful in the ordinary, except very occasionally. This may make her more our contemporary in some ways. But it does not, in my opinion, make her the greater artist. It should continue to be kept in mind, moreover, that she took her own life, and that it is not critically naive in such cases to keep alert to divisions and disharmonies in an artist’s work indicative of excessive strains.

However, my main concern . . . is with the art and craft of photography. Arbus in a substantial number of her photographs was a brilliant and moving artist whose work will last as long as photography does. But to understand both her distinction and her limitations entails seeing her place in a complex tradition, one of the most important traditions in photography, a tradition that is a great deal more than “documentary,” though some documentary photographers belong in it. She was not a pseudo-primitive or a semi-conceptualist. She was a traditional artist, just like the other figures I have named, and, like them, she was an artist deeply interested in and respectful toward her craft. And people who believe that photography is indeed, in Mr. Schickel’s words, “a full-fledged artistic medium” might do well to keep insisting that a deep respect for craftsmanship and a steady interest in what can be learned from others and passed on to others are probably, especially these days, irreplaceable features in what makes an art truly humane.

John Fraser
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia

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Richard Schickel writes:

John Fraser’s letter is typical of the kind of soft-focus humanism that has retarded the growth of intelligent critical discussion of photography for so many years, and against which Diane Arbus spoke out so forcefully.

Let me dispose of two minor matters quickly. For convenience’s sake I divided photography into two major traditions. Obviously there are many more sub-traditions in photography, but I believe that for purposes of a brief discussion, most of them can be subsumed by these two categories. Those that can’t be—industrial, fashion, and advertising photography, for example—are hardly worth mentioning in an essay devoted to photography as an art. As for the salon tradition, I really don’t much like it, hence my rather offhand dismissal of it. I readily recognize the historical importance of the names Mr. Fraser lists, but I find their work rather academic and sterile, which may or may not be a defect in me. Anyway, I didn’t feel it was very germane to the work at hand—Diane Arbus’s. I quite agree with Mr. Fraser that she was “a highly sophisticated craftsman. . . ,” etc. Indeed, I don’t see how anyone reading my article with the slightest care could think I thought otherwise. Nevertheless, I must insist that it is more interesting and profitable to see Mrs. Arbus as an artist who consciously and deliberately rejected most of the work that had gone before her than it is to shoehorn her into some imaginary tradition or other. Indeed, it seems to me that the body of Mr. Fraser’s letter proves my point.

Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans all took superb portraits, of course, but they are, I think, very different, one from the other, in technique and intention, and farther still from Mrs. Arbus. For instance, the very title of Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, to which Mr. Fraser refers, implies a search for the typical and implies, as well, an attempt at social commentary. In the compilation of remarks that stand as an introduction to the present volume, Mrs. Arbus specifically rejected the search for the typical as a worthwhile goal for the photographer and I don’t think she ever saw her people as representatives of the American spirit, mood, mind, or what have you. Her search was always for the unique and her style tended to emphasize, above all else, the singularity of her subjects. As for Cartier-Bresson, one of his collections was entitled The Decisive Moment and that, too, implies a goal quite different from Mrs. Arbus’s. He tended to take his subjects unaware, catching their expressions at the highest pitch of whatever drama was preoccupying them (and distracting attention from his lens). It is a technique as distant as one can imagine from that employed by Mrs. Arbus. Lange and Evans were, for the most part, formalists and one need only glance at the way they employed light to model their subjects’ features to see the difference between what they were up to and what Arbus, with her flat, artless lighting, was attempting. Indeed, her associate, Marvin Israel, recently pointed out to me that in her last years Mrs. Arbus was very interested in old-fashioned newspaper photography, the curiously revealing effects that could be obtained with a crude flash gun. Restudying her work, I can see the results of this interest and am glad to acknowledge Mr. Israel’s point. But it only serves to separate her further from the people with whom Mr. Fraser wants to associate her.

Single-flash photography, the bulb popping right in the subject’s face, very often blacks out the background entirely, isolating him from the “social context” that means more to Mr. Fraser (at least in photography) than it does to me. It has always seemed to me that the documentarians have overstressed it. It offers an easy explanation for the tragedies they saw in the faces they photographed. By contrast, Diane Arbus’s people are very much on their own, isolated, in her compositions. They are the victims not so much of a specific time or place, but of the larger tragedy that victimizes everyone, everywhere, in all ages. They are, in short, the victims of life. You can’t palm off what you see in their faces on, let us say, social injustice or racial intolerance or some other malfunctioning of the system any more than you palm off what you see in a painting by Goya on the corruption of the 18th-century Spanish monarchy. Contrary to Mr. Fraser, I think her self-imposed limits in lighting and composition made Diane Arbus a greater artist—or at least a more original one—than the others he names. She was deliberately filtering out the easy symbols, the little aids to quick study that are present in so much photography, focusing her lens, her consciousness (and through it, ours) on the enigmatic, the unknowable. That is why one returns so often, so profoundly attentive, to her work. Indeed, one might point out that there is nothing in those photographs as facile as Mr. Fraser’s gratuitous speculation that “part of her tragedy was that she was not sufficiently interested in social contexts.” Who knows what formed her tragedy? And how dare he impute it to so banal a cause as that? But then, we apparently have very different ideas of what constitutes “respect” for “the dignity of ordinary people.” His seems to me imaginatively limited and rather sentimental. Mine—and perhaps Mrs. Arbus’s—undoubtedly seems to him harsh, even cruel. But that is one of those matters that seems to me unarguable.