The sixties is an era that astonished me because of its richness and complexities. The biggest association in my mind is between the sixties and hippies, drug culture, and rock and roll. However, visiting an art gallery gave me a new perspective to life in the sixties and early seventies, especially in the Big Apple -New York.
I visited Timothy Taylor Gallery in London last week, and there was an exhibition of works by American photographer, Diane Arbus (1923-1971). There were sixty photographs, some never been shown before in the UK, spanning the period from 1957-1971. Arbus’s subject is people not nature. You will definitely find at least one pair of eyes staring at you from her photos. Her photographs are both captivating and shocking. She did not seek beauty in profiling people, but instead her photographs record realities in its most ordinary and extraordinary sense, in its beauty and ugliness. Arbus had said: “I don’t like to arrange things, if I standing front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” They capture people of different ages (children, adolescents, and elderly), different ethnic backgrounds (whites, blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Rican) and different social classes (the poor and the upper-class). They record people, lives, and trends and reflect the diversity of New York; you see racially mixed couples, dwarfs, giants, twins and triplets, transvestites and lots of naked people in nudist camp.
I stood staring at each photograph, trapped into an era I don’t know and haven’t lived through! How wonderful to discover that you can time -travel through photography!
Diane Arbus: Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C.Identical twins, Roselle, N.J.
A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.Triplets in their bedroom, N.J.
Identical twins, Roselle, N.J.
Triplets in their bedroom, N.J.
Amna A.J. Al-Thani
Interesting points. You shift form an outset of listing a series of remarkable historical events to describing expressive photography in that era. Eccentric yet intriguing!!June 9th, 2009 @ 1:55 am
Nada Al-Mahmeed
I found the attached picture of the Puerto Rican woman very expressive and very charismatic. I Started searching for more information and photographs by Arbus and I found the following quote by her: "Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. 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. Lke 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 traumatifc experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." ... Among the photographs I found by her there were many of what she classifies as “freaks”. She was able to capture a moment, a feeling and deliver some kind of message through the photographs. Well, at least that is how I felt while looking at some of her work. A very remarkable photographer with an interesting style of photography.June 11th, 2009 @ 8:53 pm