Art and life

Diane Arbus saw mid-20th century New York as if she was in a waking dream. Or at least that is the impression you get from the exhibition of her early photographs at the Hayward Gallery.

She was attracted to people on the margins of society — or, as she roundly called them, ‘freaks’: fairground performers, assorted human oddities and individuals with non-standard bodies such as ‘Miss Makrina, a Russian Midget, in her Kitchen NYC’ (1959). Arbus famously observed of such individuals: ‘They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.’

However, Arbus could make just about anybody — or thing — appear unaccountably strange. An old couple on a park bench, for example, or the youthful Miss Marian Seymour apparently fast asleep while waltzing at the Grand Opera Ball, 1959. That’s what made her, for want of a better word, an artist.

Arbus (1923–71) was a late starter — she spent her twenties and early thirties collaborating on fashion photography with her husband — and she died young, committing suicide at 48 just as her work was becoming an art-world sensation.

The Hayward exhibition is mainly devoted to the late 1950s and early 1960s, years during which she found her true path, though the final room contains a selection from the portfolio ‘A box of ten photographs’ of 1970 and 1971.

From the moment it was unveiled to the world in 1839, photography was often presented as offering us objective truth. Arbus does the opposite. In her hands, the camera was a way of revealing how she experienced life around her: weird, haunted and banal all at the same time.

In contrast Don McCullin, whose work is presented in a big career retrospective at Tate Britain, has spent much of his life in pursuit of a certain kind of truth.