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Article Excerpt
Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard
PORTLAND - The world has got Diane Arbus all wrong.
She was not, as the late Susan Sontag would have had you believe, a narcissistic exploiter of the deranged and downtrodden. She wasn't mean-spirited. She didn't take advantage of her subjects, any more than does the average journalist who lulls people into sitting down for a story or a photo.
In saying this, I am planting myself on the minority side of a divide in American photography criticism, which more often than not holds that Arbus, a New York photographer who killed herself in 1971, was essentially cruel to the people she photographed - among them physical freaks and the mentally disabled - as well as to her audience, whom she meant to shock and to annoy.
Whether she was mean-spirited in her work has, unfortunately, become the central question that is asked about Arbus, whose photography deserves far better and more careful understanding and investigation.
The question arises at all because her work is so gripping and intimate that the photographs are almost impossible to separate from the photographer. How, we think, could she have possibly gotten these people to let her take these pictures? Unable to ask the people in the photos, we move quickly from skepticism to distrust.
This question has lingered, unflattering and unresolved, because the Arbus estate has...
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