Bosworth's Life of Arbus

Sorry to do two photography posts in a row, but that's what I'm reading about these days. I think maybe my next novel is going to involve a photo and video documentarian, so all these books fall under the category of "research."

I was pretty excited about this biography of Diane Arbus, which has evidently now served as the inspiration for a really bad movie about Diane Arbus. I'm in the Arbus-is-awesome camp, though I know a lot of people find her photos exploitive or insulting. For me, Arbus's pictures are all about the uncanny singularity of human beings--her "freaks" are ultimately not all that much more freaky than we are, they just can't conceal it. I've always seen a great love for her subjects in her work, even if some of them haven't seen it that way, later.

In any event, I found this book frustrating. Bosworth is very good on Arbus's life outside her art--her upbringing, her depression, her relationship to sex and to her body. But the thing I wanted the most was the very thing this book--and almost any biography, ultimately--was least articulate about: the pictures themselves. Maddeningly, there are no Arbus images of any significance in the paltry sets of photos included; one imagines that this is a copyright issue, but it's still a major omission in a biography of a photographer. And this omission seems to carry over into the text itself. Bosworth describes a few important pictures, and touches occasionally on how they were taken, but for the most part these sections are heavily generalized, describing the kind of things Arbus did while working, as opposed to specific things, techniques, approaches, philosophies.

The book also lacks a clear sense of how Arbus used the tools of her trade. This isn't merely a gear-geek complaint: Arbus clearly found cameras important and fascinating. She carried many different ones at once, and sometimes grew disenchanted with one or other, precipitating a switch. We learn that, early on, she switches from the Leica to the Rollei, and later from the Rollei to the Pentax. But aside from a few brief technical details, we don't know what this means. Arbus is quoted in here at one point as saying that she liked complicated cameras, that taking a picture shouldn't be easy. In the book I wanted to be reading, this would be the springboard for an entire chapter. What was it about the process, for Arbus, that made her want to struggle? How, specifically, was the process connected to her life, to her sense of herself?

Bosworth should be commended here for not offering up a reductive cause-and-effect "explanation" for Arbus's work--the psychological portrait we get of the artist is distinctive, respectful, and convincing. But there is a great void when it comes to the pictures: it's as though Bosworth is more interested in Arbus the woman--and Arbus as a woman--than about Arbus the artist. Most maddening is the absence of any real discussion of her very late work photographing developmentally disabled people in New Jersey--we hear about her taking these pictures just before her suicide, but never see them, and never see anyone else seeing them, in spite of a new afterword by the author, written a couple of years ago. I think these pictures will go down in history as the best thing Arbus ever did--they're beautiful and moving and strange, and the product of her switch to "the Pentax," the effects of which we don't ever hear about in this book.

This may sound like nitpicking. I realize that it's hard to write about art, especially in the context of a broader, more personal goal. But this is why I almost never read biographies of artists--the stuff I want the most is never there. I don't care about the nannies and the boyfriends--I care about the pictures.

What Rhian's Not Mentioning About Alice Munro

My wife, in her last post, didn't mention that we have Alice Munro's new book sitting on the coffee table, where it's been sitting for weeks, unread.

Why are we avoiding our favorite living writer? Because the stories in this new book are autobiographical. Alice Munro says so, right there in the introduction. If we open it up, we may find out the truth. And nothing's scarier than that.

Alice Munro and Real Life

I first read Alice Munro in college, when a friend pressed Lives of Girls and Women on me, saying that I would relate to it. She was right. I loved that book not because I admired it, but because Munro said things about my life at that moment that I hadn't even noticed before. My own life felt larger and more rich because of her life.

But it's not her life -- it's fiction, right? I'd always assumed that there's a strong autobiographical source for much of AM's fiction, if for no other reason than the recurrence of certain motifs: the inappropriate lover, the sick mother, the bourgeois husband. And one other that I might not have noticed if it weren't for the latest story in Harper's: drowning.

"Miles City, Montana" is the big drowning story, with one drowned child in the back story and an near-drowning in the front. There's one in an old story, "Walking on Water," and a sunk car with people in it in a later story. I think there are more. Anyway, enough to make a person wonder, "So... what is it with Alice Munro and drowning?"

You wouldn't ask that of a memoirist -- she would tell you right out, and that would be that. One of the reasons I prefer fiction to memoir is because fiction lets the writer work through variations on a theme. In one story the protagonist is just a witness to a drowning; in another story she's at fault through neglect; in another she's completely to blame.

What really happened? Munro would probably say it doesn't matter, and I guess it doesn't. Knowing wouldn't make me get more out of the stories, or cause me to like them less. Still, wondering about her real life has always been a part of my experience reading AM -- thinking about how what really happened gets turned around and comes out as fiction is endlessly fascinating.