Diane Arbus: Revelations
V&A, London

Nicky Charlish
posted 2 December 2005

Roll up, roll up, the whole world's here! The world of Diane Arbus, that is, a place of freak show performers, transvestites, nudists, mental home inmates, the elderly. The trouble is, this world is too much, and too, too late. What's outstanding from it in this exhibition?

Everything is - and that's the trouble. Arbus was born in New York City in 1923 and started taking pictures in the early 1940s. Her career would span the following two decades, and with that city as its main backdrop. Like a clumsy person who can't help knocking things over, she doesn't seem capable of taking a photograph unless there's something disturbing in its subject-matter. Of course, life isn't all sweetness and light and, if you're going to capture it in all its fullness, then you're going to include some strange stuff. A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx seems shocking, not only because of the way he stoops to fit in the small room, but also because of the surprised looks on his parents' faces, as if his height is still a shock for them - an offence, almost.

A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street seems both shocked at having been caught out en femme, yet surprised that someone should want to photograph something that is - for him - perfectly normal. But the mother of the young Brooklyn family on a Sunday outing - a mundane subject, you might think - has bouffant hair and heavy slap that would put the most ardent drag queen to shame. A straw-hatted boy preparing to march at a pro-Vietnam War demonstration has the beaky nose and round eyes of a geeky escapee from the pages of a Mad comic. Only rarely do we get any feeling of revelation here that rises above the innate strangeness of a photograph's subject-matter. The desolation which clouds the face of a widow in her bedroom is heightened by the room's kitchy statues. And the graininess of a photograph of the interior of a 42nd Street movie theatre chillingly captures the emptiness of lonely people who are killing time or seeking sex (such cinemas were legendary venues for brief encounters of varying sexual types).

Arbus has been criticised for seeming to exploit her subjects, for treating them as freak show exhibits for the amusement of the straight world. Some of her subjects seem to have felt and feared this. Several of the faces which stare out at us from the walls of this exhibition betray a sense of uncertainty, seemingly about whether they should have let themselves be photographed. But the charge of exploitation is the risk run by every photographer who attempts to show the less conventional aspects of human existence or behaviour. The photograph of a stripper with bare breasts sitting in her changing room in Atlantic City can be seen as exploitation (she's not in her first flush of youth) or as a picture of a victim of exploitation. (Even allowing for the usual standards of backstage grottiness, if the condition of the room is anything to go by, she's probably not on the highest of stripper salaries, and the audience is probably pretty unappetising too). Maybe Arbus had a gloomy personality that made her seek out such subject-matter.

The real problem with Arbus' work is that it's been overtaken by events. It's become a victim of its own success. She committed suicide in 1971, and the social attitudes that provided a necessary contrast with her work to make it stand out have, over the intervening decades, died too. The picture of a dominatrix at work with a client would have been considered 'far out' four decades ago. It's different now. Changed sexual mores, reductions in censorship and fly-on-the-wall documentaries purporting to show the unvarnished, unedited truth of human situations, have all made the once strange a regular part of life. The idea of shame has - by and large - died out. If we dislike a particular subject, well, we can always reach for the remote. The rise of achievement-lite celebrity has also played a part: indeed, this exhibition gives an example of its beginnings. A nudist couple sit, smiling at us, radiating self-satisfaction at the mere fact of their nudity. Doubtless they considered themselves cool, but here the transgressive seems to mean small-time perviness that's pleased with itself. Today, unearned fame radiates from the covers of also-ran celebrity magazines in every newsagent.

The exhibition wafts us back to the New York City of Truman Capote's Answered Prayers before it was sterilised by mayoral clean-ups. The pictures are worth seeing as relics of a time long past. But - unless you're unfamiliar with the cultural shifts and norms of the past few decades - don't expect great shocks.

Till 15 January 2006.