Re: Art in the Sixties

LaniDoe@aol.com
Fri, 26 Jan 1996 19:23:44 -0500

I can't really answer to Dianne Arbus's motivation, but a further clue might
be a -new- book that just came out of her photographs. The pictures are of
people in a mental institution.

>From Wendy - What demons haunted this woman, that she shot
the marginalized, the outcasts, and the downright bizarre? And why did she
kill herself- did she see the horrors to come, or was it the horrors of the
moment?

I don't think she saw horrors to come. I think what the photos show is what
she saw, and more importantly, how she saw it. The outcasts that she saw and
chose to photo are people that are most often ignored, and if seen, quickly
forgotten. She notices them, and makes more other people notice them too.
It is forever unclear whether the anguish often shown in the faces and body
language that she shows are a reflection of her own. It is hard to tell
whether she indeed took pictures for her self, or as a means to communicate
with others.

Anyhow, whichever, whatever, they are certainly moving pictures, and I had
forgotten that they were also part of the 60s. In a curious way, like her
photo subjects, they fit in, and they don't.

-Lani