I’m currently taking a few online classes for the summer. Last week in one of my classes, we studied Diane Arbus, an American photographer who worked from the 1940s to her death in the 70s. Basically, the premise of Arbus’s best-known work is that she photographs “freaks.” (This is not my term, but the term that Arbus herself and many critics used.) In a similar vein, other famous photographs take “normal” people and make them look “freakish.”
Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City, USA (1962) by Diane Arbus
Arbus’s approach to her subjects made me really uncomfortable. It’s rather ambiguous as to whether or not Arbus actually got consent from her subjects. For example, that boy with the grenade? As he explained in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle, he didn’t even know it was in a museum until a classmate saw it years later.
Another part of my unease is the immediacy that I feel when I look at Arbus’s images – today, I have the privilege of being invisible, but I remember living in Manhattan as an androgynous person. Everybody stared at me. In Manhattan, for crying out loud. Once, some tourists took photographs of me on the subway. It is difficult to experience something like this, to go home feeling like a zoo animal, and then look at Arbus’s photographs and see this woman doing the exact same thing to her subjects. It’s not really such a leap to assume that, had I lived in the ’60s, Arbus would have gone crazy over how fabulously “freakish” I looked and put me on a museum wall for her own personal gain.
But it wasn’t just Arbus’s approach to her subjects that made me uncomfortable: the critical reaction to Arbus made me really uneasy. Academics and critics value “neutrality.” But I think that this is an illusory concept – if you look at it closely, the “neutral” viewpoint actually promotes a specific narrative. The narrative that I saw in many critiques of Arbus’s work was: “Everybody wants to be normal, because being normal is good. So when Diane Arbus made everybody, even normal people, look like a freak, that was totally disturbing because nobody wants to be a creepy freak.”
Some critics say that Arbus smashed the binary between “normal” and “freak.” I disagree: I think that she did the opposite and reinforced that binary. Personally, some of these “freaks” are my everyday life, integral parts of my social network. They are my best friends, my lovers, my second family. And me? I’ve been different all my life – I wouldn’t give up any of my differences because they make me me. I’m not a freak or normal in and of myself. Nobody is. It is society that arbitrarily applies the label of “freak” to some and “normal” to others.
