Freakshow!

After long, hard weekend, I walked into the grainy world of Diane Arbus at Nottingham Contemporary and walked out to a grey, rainy afternoon floored by such an intimate slice of 60s life. And walked wondering why this talented woman with the world at her feet had gone the way of Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and other members of the 60s/70s suicide club.

Arbus came from a privileged Jewish background – her father was a wealthy furrier. She married young (18), had two children, divorced. But it was only really after her divorce that she gave free expression to her creativity, walking on the wild side, visiting the Bowery and Upper East side cataloguing New York’s downtrodden, deviants, freaks and the retarded and marginalised in society.

Look at the shots and witness her obsession with grotesquerie. The dwarves, the giant, the twins (spookily reminiscent of The Shining), the painted ladies, the trannies, the naturists…all on the fringes of society. All too often labeled abnormal, stared at and pitied. Even the blonde showgirl with pneumatic breasts who drips glamour looks bizarre set against a shabby dressing room that’s more Cynthia Payne bedsit Streatham than Las Vegas.

"Freaks were a thing I photographed a lot," she wrote. "It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

Maybe that was the problem, maybe Arbus' reality became twisted by her subject matter. Maybe she saw only too clearly that life itself was a freakshow and she looked too deeply into the heart of darkness until the angst and pain became unbearable and pills and the razor seemed the only escape. I think Bukowski’s poem, Cause and Effect sums up her suicide perfectly.

Cause and Effect

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

Charles Bukowski