OUR Diane Arbus On March 14, he would have turned 100 years old, but he could not have been born yet. Why photo they still seem new to her, with an absurd freshness, as if they had just discovered the art of photography, and we look at her images, at this collection of oddities, with the same amazement with which a person of the 19th century first saw daguerreotypes, like John Once Szarkowski stated that he determined the direction of photography in the 20th century by his choice, being the director of the corresponding department at MoMA for about 30 years.

When she committed suicide in 1971, she was already well known in New York art circles, but her retrospective in Modern Art Museum, a year later, lived up to her reputation because the world was confronted with a look as primitive and distorted as the faces she chose to frame with her lens. Another life experience, which until now had not been disclosed, circulated among the 112 photographs in the strangest possible way.

The discomfort she caused to the public was due to the fact that Arbus was not at all sympathetic when she photographed the fringe groups she approached – outcasts, freaks, nudists – but instead, her recording embodied a classy stance, which, according to Susan Sontag, was a “humble” and “disastrous” approach because he relied on distance.

Diana Arbus presented us with a collection of strange faces without a hint of cynicism and not content with a challenge.

But it wasn’t quite like that, and in time it turned out that this other world was finally our hidden portrait, which interpreted the most well-guarded wounds we had, allowing them to manifest and finally emerge from the darkness: the cry of a child. a child with a plastic grenade in Central Park, a giant looking at his parents like ants, even that charged Christmas tree finding the ceiling depicted a separate and buried part of us, magically, like a reflection of a crooked mirror or filters on a mobile phone make us more beautiful or dumber, which is almost the same thing. “Everyone is weird and wonderful as freaks. No one can tell themselves apart. We are all victims of our peculiarity,” she wrote in one of the many notebooks she left behind.

Her method can be described as follows: “I’m going where I’ve never been.” But also in its reverse variation: “I go where I belong, because I have never been.” For Arbus, the image was a mystery about a mystery. The secret is in the disturbing silence of silence, one might add. Her teacher and photographer Lisette Modell recalls trying to find a system to capture the people she met on the street in unnatural stillness, as if she wanted to stop time. He made them pose with their eyes fixed on the lens, trying to create a crisp, airless atmosphere because he hated spontaneity. In the end, it turned out just the opposite. Everything pulsates in her portraits, especially the details: a button on a cardigan, sausages, a spoon in her hand, an olive on her neck, a missing tooth, cigarette smoke.

Even in the series he filmed from 1969 to 1971 in psychiatric hospitals, and which was published posthumously as Untitled, it was not really a theme, as he implicitly believed in it, but a backstory for groups of itinerant eaters. shelter exterior. The dusk is still and at the same time liquid, like milk, black and white, blissful and dangerous, a web waiting for its prey: us. For Arbus, the game was not about technique, paper quality or appearance chemicals, but where you came from deciding to photograph, from which deep and rocky sides of your body, if any, you extracted images. you saved in your camera.

With an intellectual naivete that only American artists are blessed with, she distanced herself from her urban origins and, after working in fashion magazines, handed over to us a collection of strange faces without a hint of cynicism and not satisfied with the challenge – after all, she was more concerned with disengaging her. Nan Goldin, her most powerful descendant, perhaps at closer range recorded her lumpen camaraderie, friendship and love as a battlefield where death reaps, but even she did not surpass Arbus morally or in terms of grief. Perhaps because Arbus’ monothematic mania made her, unlike Goldin, always off topic, offering her what she desired: photographing the present as a frantic ceremony of stillness.