Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil by Deborah Nelson

Author:Deborah Nelson [Nelson, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-45794-9
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

On Photography

Little attention has been paid to the fact that the 1972 retrospective of the photography of Diane Arbus at the Museum of Modern Art produced Sontag’s landmark On Photography. Certainly, critics always mention Sontag, now mostly in passing, in criticism of Arbus’s work, but Arbus’s importance to Sontag is rarely noted, if at all. Sontag’s unofficial (and only) biography tells us that On Photography itself, not just the essay “America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly,” grew out of her fascination with Arbus’s photographs and the unusually intense popular reaction to her retrospective, mounted the year after Arbus’s suicide. Photographed herself by Arbus six years earlier, Sontag was “knocked out” by the work and equally astonished at the crowds visiting the exhibit (some 250,000 people saw this show; the book that accompanied the exhibition sold 100,000 copies).25 No collection of photography had achieved such mass appeal since Edward Steichen curated the “Family of Man” exhibit at MOMA in 1955. Sontag noted about the analogy: “Instead of people whose appearances please, representative folk doing their human thing, the Arbus show lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases—most of them ugly: wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings—who have paused to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidentially at the viewer.”26 In 1955 unprecedented crowds had congregated to take pleasure in what Sontag defined as “sentimental humanism,” a representation of a world without conflict; in 1972 similar numbers assembled to be confronted by its inverse, a world united by pain. The Arbus show epitomized for Sontag a disconcerting shift in the art and politics of suffering, one that she understood to be inescapably “anesthetic.”

The problem of anesthetics weighed heavily on Sontag’s reflections on the photographic image. In 1972, the year of Arbus’s show, the most famous photograph in the country was of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a dirt road, her arms outstretched, her mouth wide open, her face contorted. Though she was not alone in the photograph (there are other children who are clothed, a boy whose face betrays his agony, and others who appear more frightened than injured; there are US soldiers walking nonchalantly down the side of the road paying no attention to the children), the photograph came to be called “napalmed girl”; it won a Pulitzer Prize and was named the World Photograph of the Year. Sontag called these kinds of photographs “novelt[ies] of misery” and argued in the opening essay of her book that the ubiquity of such images deprived them of the novelty that was meant to shock. The images themselves were not anesthetizing, but the volume of images “upped the ante,” creating a vicious cycle that swelled the number and horror of images while simultaneously diluting their effect. Sontag’s criticisms of Arbus are couched in much the same terms as her concerns about war photojournalism. In fact, so close are they that in Sontag’s miscellany of quotations at the end of On Photography, Arbus becomes a war photographer, as she indeed sometimes saw herself.

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