Saturday, April 23, 1977
By Jo Ann Lewis
“I really believe there are things nobody would see unless I photographed them,” said Diane Arbus of her poignant, unblinking photographs of freaks, nudists, and transsexuals.
Surely no one would argue that her work depicts the very people most of us were taught in childhood not to stare at, those who by birth or choice live outside what we call “polite” society.
In the first major show of her color work in Washington, currently at the Lunn Gallery (3243 P St. NW), Arbus seems to be asking us to look squarely at the inherent dignity of these “curiosities” and see what makes us think we’re so much better. “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” Arbus once said. “Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They are aristocrats.”
A great mystique grew around Arbus after her suicide in 1971 at age 48, very like the mystique that surrounded Sylvia Plath. It was just before her first show at the Museum of Modern Art. But in an interview in a posthumously published monograph on the artist (Aperture, 1972), Arbus makes clear to anyone who sees her work merely as the “sick” product of a “sick” mind that her artistic goals were extremely well-defined.
“It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general the result will be,” said Arbus.
She sought to make an absolutely decisive statement about her painstakingly chosen subjects, with sympathy but without ambiguity. She succeeds with profound effect, whether she photographed a fat nudist family, an aging burlesque comedienne, or men dancing at a “Drag Ball.”
While Arbus searches out her subjects from the people around her, Washington photographer Joyce Tenneson Cohen, in her latest work, performs for her own camera, acting out costumed scenarios scripted by her own subconscious.
Her series of Self-Portraits, now on view at the Washington Gallery of Photography (216 Seventh St. SE), are concerned not with the artist’s physical appearance but with her psychic being—her feelings and thoughts as evoked by specific places, such as the house where she grew up, or objects, such as a treasured family wedding dress.
In a real way, this is visualized psychoanalysis, with the artist portraying rather than verbalizing her feelings about the past, and the camera playing the ever-silent role of listener-observer.
Artists in all media have been preoccupied with self-examination in recent years—psychic, physical, and ethnic—as in Alex Haley’s Roots. How these works succeed as art, however, depends upon the profundity and universality of the ideas and the artist’s ability to express them.
Cohen, a good photographer to begin with seems to be in mid-stream in this respect. There is much highly expressive work that any sensitive viewer could understand at different stages in life such as the pair of photos showing the artist as simultaneously older and younger than her 31-year-old self. And there are many ambiguous works that can be read into, ad infinitum.
In other photographs, however, ambiguity seems to serve more as a crutch than as a well-honed tool, and despite all efforts to avoid it, there is still an overintense, “arty” look that must be overcome, and no doubt will be in time. For now, however, Cohen is clearly an artist to keep an eye on.
Though it hasn’t been mentioned for fear of losing those who prefer to divide art into “good” and “bad” rather than “male” and “female,” the best shows in town this week seem to be photography shows by women who have made a strong showing in the field—from Julia Margaret Cameron on down to Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, Model, and Arbus. New talent continues to emerge across the country.
At Sam Tamashiro’s delightful Intuitive Eye gallery downtown, across the street from the back of the Archives Building at 641 Indiana Avenue NW, two new talents from Chicago are on view, both of whom deal exclusively with the nude figure.
Jane Wenger uses a wide-angle lens, often looking from the ground up to the sky, thereby dramatically foreshortening her nude figures into monumental forms. In a group of self-portraits, Wenger, unlike Cohen, bares not her soul but her body, again with the emphasis on formal pictorial arrangements, which can also be read as pure abstraction.
Also, at Intuitiveeye is Carole Harmel whose still-life studies of nude figures and fruit are sometimes too contrived, though there are some nicely toned black-and-white prints.
While there, have a look at the poetic photos of Elizabeth Matheson and the hand-tinted works by male photographer Bennett Hall.
The Washington Women’s Art Center at 1821 Q St. NW is showing color photographs by psychoanalyst Barbara Young from Baltimore, whose show would have benefited immensely from some heavy editing. Though a few works are evocative and use color meaningfully—notably a well-composed aerial view of the muddy Arno in Florence—several other pieces are so banal and full of clichés that one can only conclude that this is the work of a gifted amateur who has looked at a lot of contemporary photography.
Also on view at WWAC are watercolor studies for sculpture projects by Marianne La Roche that hold promise for the future but say little in themselves. They do relate, however, to the fine and very strong work by Maria Heider Rosenzweig, who is having a first solo show at Gallery 10—one that deserves to be seen.