Looking into the lives of America’s outsiders

The work of the American photographer who took her own life in 1971, aged 48, has famously divided popular and critical comment. While some view Diane Arbus’s large, square-format, black and white portraits of “outsiders” — such as giants, twins and mixed-race couples — as empathetic, others find the images obtrusive, exploitative and prurient.

Arbus was born in 1923 in New York, where her Russian-Jewish parents ran Russek’s, a famous department store on Fifth Avenue. Howard Nemerov, her brother, went on to become America’s poet laureate and Renée Nemerov Brown, her sister, carved out her own identity as an artist. The siblings had a privileged upbringing, largely insulated from the effects of the Great Depression.

Susan Sontag, the writer, who knew Arbus and was photographed by her, wrote: “[Arbus’s] work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”

Whether or not we agree, it is obvious that Arbus’s arresting images still hold our interest. They surely force us to admit some uncomfortable truths, including the fact that we are fascinated by the sheer variety and oddity of others. These portraits show their subjects head-on, allowing us to peruse, to stare and to scrutinise. Arbus is less interested in deformity than “otherness”.

A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970 shows Eddie Carmel, the 34-year-old circus performer, dwarfing his parents, and their living space. Arbus has confined her subjects in the corner of the harshly lit room. The giant stoops, his enormous frame supported by a stick, as if under the weight of his own condition, while his mother stares up at him, in apparent incredulity.

At the opening of the Arbus retrospective, Revelations, in New York, in 2005 the subjects of Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey 1967, Cathleen Mulcahy and Colleen Yorke, are shown alongside their portrait taken years earlier. The women are easily recognisable from the famous portrait in which Arbus eerily portrays the identically dressed girls, one half-smiling, the other half-frowning, as if conjoined.

This is Arbus’s special quality — to imbue the ordinary with an air of otherness and to point her lens in directions unremarked by others.

Kirkcaldy Museum until May 31