Unbelievable …two train rides up to New York for two landmark photography shows in two weeks!! Is this the good life or what! This type of opportunity doesn’t come up that often, but when it does you have to jump on it, otherwise you’ll cry later. And next week is the annual Zombie Walk in Asbury Park that I will photograph again. Damn!
I was a little on the fence about talking the time off to go back to New York so soon when I heard about the Arbus show called Cataclysm – The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited. I had the well-known Aperture monograph derived from the original blockbuster show and to be honest it wasn’t in my power rotation. Nevertheless, something inside me said go. There might not be another chance in my lifetime to see what this promised to be – a complete reproduction of the MoMA show organized by John Szarkowski fifty years ago – down the exact number of prints show – 113! And if the recent Klein show taught me anything, it’s that sometimes standing in front of the real thing can be an experience you simply can’t be prepared for that can have a dramatic impact on your photographic thinking and seeing.
The show is on view until October 22nd at The David Zwirner Gallery at 537 West 20th Street, conveniently about 15 minutes of brisk walking from Penn Station. I need to take a moment here to mention that the West 20th Street location (he has more than one gallery in New York and others in London, Paris, and Hong Kong), may be one of the most impressive private galleries I’ve ever been in … more like a museum than a gallery. Very large with a number of rooms on two floors. This allowed the photos to be given ample space between each other to breath. The black and white images were beautifully seen and printed, framed in simple white metal and hung on matching white painted walls. Simply exquisite.
So, what about those prints? Fifty years ago, these pictures turned the photographic world upside down; they mostly depict people viewed by the mainstream as different or in other ways odd. Transvestites, nudists, stripers, dwarfs, giants, tattooed, twins, triplets, socially awkward teenage Viet Nam War supporters, children with downs syndrome, aging women trying to hang on to what was and people hiding behind costumes and masks. Most of the pictures were what I think of as environmental portraits, as well as some very compelling close-ups made with both 35mm and medium format twin lens reflex cameras. Two pictures, though not next two each other seem to form a compelling pair. A head and shoulders portrait of a newborn and the same type of photo of an aging socialite … what once was and what now had become?
All the famous images are there, and yes that picture of the little boy holding the plastic hand grenade and glaring at the camera is still frightening – all the more in person! In short, the show is as fresh and important today as it was fifty years ago.
If you’re nearby or even not you need to see it!
Stay safe,
Michael