Art for Art’s Sake
People with Disabilities in Art Photography
JAMES A. KNOLL
This chapter is based on an extensive study of art photographs found in various published books and exhibit catalogs. A more thorough analysis and discussion of the research in this chapter can be found in Knoll 1987.
Because of restrictions involved in obtaining permissions to publish some illustrations I had chosen for this chapter, I have been unable to include many of the images I hoped to. Those I have included are in the public domain, or the photographers or their agents have granted permission to reproduce them here. As a substitute for the images not included, I have provided the references to where the images can be found online or in hard-copy books. The limitations on publishing the images are a reflection on the degree to which the art world controls and defines certain photographic images as precious.
This book emphasizes the context in which photographs are created and displayed. When photographs get hung under designer spotlights on the white walls of an art gallery or displayed in expensive art books, they are transformed into art.11 Positioned in the art world,22 pictures become images with artistic significance. Aesthetics soars above social content. A classic example of this transformation of a photograph of a person with a disability into art is the famous image “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath.”33 W. Eugene Smith took this photo in 1971 as part of his photographic essay on the effect of chemical pollution on the lives of Japanese fishermen and their families in the town of Minamata. In its original context, this powerful image was the culmination of a photo essay in Life magazine published on June 2, 1972. In the image, the mother is seated in a large Japanese bathtub washing her severely deformed daughter. A soft light illuminates the mother’s loving gaze as she carefully observes her daughter’s face.
Smith, a dedicated documentary photographer, spent years living in this village recording in photographs the progressive deterioration of many of the town residents. He was seriously injured and experienced an ongoing disability as a result of the beating he took at the hands of thugs hired by the chemical company in an effort to thwart his work (Smith and Smith 1975).
Why is this powerful image not reproduced here? In 2001, the heirs of Eugene Smith, who held the copyright to the image, publicly announced that they would no longer permit its reproduction and that they were transferring the copyright to Tomoko’s family. It had come to the heirs’ attention that Tomoko’s family felt that their now deceased daughter was being exploited by the widespread reproduction of her image in art venues that had little to do with improving the conditions of the world. Transformed into art, the photo had lost its significance as the picture of a severely disabled child who was the victim of corporate greed.
You can still find reproductions of this picture in almost every history of photography published prior to 2001. And in spite of the family’s wishes and the Smith heirs’ actions, the image continues to be widely available on the Internet, particularly on the sites of art galleries, which have original prints available for sale for as much as $13,750 each (Christie’s Auction House 2009).
As the transformation of “Tomoko and Mother in Bath” into an expensive art object illustrates, financial advantages can occur in framing a photo as art. Because many works of art are regarded as having intrinsic value, copyright holders limit the reproduction rights or require significant payment for permission to reproduce. Other genres of disability photographs displayed in this book—mostly from personal and institution collections—were distributed free of charge. Art photographers guard their work. For this reason, this chapter is bereft of illustrations that are important demonstrations of the points it makes.
Smith’s muckraking image grabs the viewer and drives home the message that unfettered profiteering by corporations destroys both the environment and human lives. When the picture is removed from the essay and displayed on a gallery wall or in the pages of a history of art photography textbook, its artistic elements rather than its social message are front and center. Within the new context, the composition, the lighting, and the image’s place within the history of art supersedes its original purpose as a piece of advocacy journalism. Art connoisseurs note how the composition of Smith’s image echoes the classic pose of innumerable paintings of Jesus being removed from the cross and placed in his mother’s arms. From the art critics’ point of view, the picture is a Pietà for the twentieth century, not an image of disability caused by corporate gluttony.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART
Eugene Smith saw himself first and foremost as a photojournalist who used his work as a tool for social change. The balance of the discussion in this chapter focuses on famous photographers whose pictures include people with disabilities but who either saw themselves primarily as artists or were cast that way by the art world. Artist is a title of distinction reserved for people who are judged by connoisseurs to be especially gifted and whose art reveal the maker’s essential exceptional talent (Becker 1982, 352–53). According to this tenet, artists by definition are creative, autonomous individuals who craft objects of beauty and depth that affect people who see their work.
The tension between the technology of photography and the concept of artist is as old as the medium. There have always been naysayers who deny the august title art to what they deem the photographer’s mere technological products. These critics can usually be found echoing conservative values that hearken to the nineteenth-century art academy with its narrowly defined parameters. However, the avant-garde in art, in particular painters, connected with and were influenced by photography from the very dawn of the medium.
During the period 1900–1915, a time when the photograph was still marginal to the art world, a group of committed photographers known collectively as the “Photo Secession” and led primarily by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen laid the foundations for widespread recognition of photography as art. They closely associated their work with painting; they distanced themselves from both amateurs who pursued photography as a hobby and commercial photographers who had to worry about pleasing clients. This group’s work, up to about 1915, was marked by a “pictorialist” style. Hallmarks of this approach include soft focus, “artistic” subject matter, and the use of technique and print manipulation to emulate the look of traditional painting. We see an example in illustration 9.1, the first photograph published in Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly journal Camera Work, a publication that served as the vehicle for advancing the agenda of photo secessionists’ promotion of photography as art.
The pull of modernist painting—work that was more experimental and abstract than traditional art—drew leaders of the secessionist movement away from their conventional approach to photography (Hales 1984, 289). The transformation of photography into modern art is captured well in Paul Strand’s 1916 picture of a blind beggar entitled “Photograph—New York” (illus. 9.2). This image and others published in the last issue of Camera Work in 1917 set the stage for what was called “art photography” throughout the twentieth century (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2006).
To a person not schooled in art world aesthetics, Strand’s picture may not seem to be a break from photographs such as “Dorothy.” (illus. 9.1). To start, however, the title of the picture is abstract. Unlike “Dorothy,” which focuses on the subject, “Photograph—New York” makes the medium central rather than the person. Unlike a photojournalist or documentary photographer, Strand did not engage with his subjects or comment on their circumstances. Instead, he used a modified lens so that his camera seemed to be pointed away from his subjects. They were thus unaware that they were being photographed (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2006). In “Photograph—New York,” this lack of awareness can be seen in the way the subject does not engage Strand; rather, her head and eyes are turned toward her left. The photograph is not softened or manipulated in ways to romanticize the figure. It is confrontational. No explanatory text accompanies the image. The emphasis is on composition, the pattern of lighting on the face, and the sign. Although the person in the picture is prominent, the picture is not about her; it is about the elements of art photography.
Strand was a student of Louis Hines, one of the leading documentary photographers of the early twentieth century whose work served as an impetus to efforts both to clean up the slums of New York and to pass child-labor laws. As Strand advanced his career as a photographer, however, he was drawn into Stieglitz’s sphere of influence. He frequented Stieglitz’s art gallery, where he was drawn to some of the first American exhibitions of modern European art (by Picasso, Braque, Cézanne, and others). Abstract art, expressionism, and Dadaism were some of the new styles that made pictorialism seem old-fashioned to him (Rosenblum 1984, 365).
Strand’s image is regarded as seminal to that movement away from pictorialism. It marked the beginning of a different aesthetic in photography, and, as related to our interest here, it set the agenda for future photographing of people with disabilities.
GARRY WINOGRAND
If we fast-forward fifty years to the 1960s, we see this vision brought to fruition in the works of a number of renowned photographic artists. I start with a photograph by Garry Winogrand, one of the major figures in the world of late-twentieth-century American photographic art: “American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964” (illus. 9.3; reproduced in Marien 2006, 346).
This photo was taken on a busy downtown Dallas street corner. Seventeen people are visible in it as they walk, wait, chat, or just stand taking in the sights. Some wear conventioneer hats. In the center of the composition is a man with no legs crawling on the cement. From his position on the ground, he looks up with an exhausted expression and stares straight into the camera. All of the other human activity swirls around and away from him. The people’s eyes look everywhere but at him. The only eyes that are watching this man are those behind the camera’s viewfinder. The naive viewer, someone not schooled in the art world, usually interprets the picture as pointing to the general indifference to a person with a disability.
But how is Winogrand’s picture “American Legion Convention, Dallas, 1964” seen in the art world? Within that world, the primary spokespersons are the curators, the historians, and the critics. Statements by individuals from each of these groups put us in touch with the art world interpretation of Garry Winogrand’s work. Be forewarned, though: people in the art world have their own vocabulary and way of talking that may seem foreign or incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
John Szarkowski, former director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art and one of Winogrand’s supporters, sees the artist as a pure formalist44 who is concerned primarily with testing the limits of photography as an art medium (Stange 1978). In her history of photography, the eminent photography historian Naomi Rosenblum asserts that Winogrand’s pictures are not statements about anything except “the uniquely prejudicial (intrinsic) qualities of photographic description” (1984, 523). The critic Bill Jay (1978) characterizes Winogrand as a naturalist55 who is engaged in a value-free, detached cataloging of what he chooses to focus on.
One element in Winogrand’s work that enchants the critics is his ability to transform an incredibly diverse array of human beings, caught in the act of daily life, into abstract visual components. They become the occupants of his picture’s frame: “The scene does not illustrate any thesis but it does emblemize the stubborn pull that photographic exposure exerts upon us. We spectators see what those in the picture do not wish to see, and their reluctance becomes the subject of our look. The situation affords us a sharp pleasure made uneasy by the gaze of the crippled man” (Kozloff 1979, 38–39).
How does the artist himself describe what he is about in his photographs? In responding to a student’s question about what makes a photograph “work,” Winogrand said: “In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed” (quoted in Malcolm 1980, 37).
Based on these descriptions, statements that likely are gobbledygook to those outside the art world and obscure even to some in that world, one might suspect that Winogrand belongs to a group of photographers who produce totally abstract work. It does not become clear until we actually look at the Winogrand’s picture that he has produced an image of life on the street featuring a person with a disability.
Within the “art” frame, a picture that can be seen as a fascinating social document is effectively removed from the event as experienced by the people captured on film. A moment in time is frozen, analyzed, and interpreted on the basis of whether it “works” as an image. A picture that can be a symbol of the struggle of people with disabilities in American society becomes a visual metaphor for the aesthetics of looking at pictures and itself becomes an aesthetic experience for gallery-goers.
“American Legion Convention” is not the only Winogrand photograph that features people with disability. His pictures include dwarfs, people in wheelchairs, and people with various physical disabilities. They, too, were taken candidly on the streets and have a quality similar to the photo I have been discussing here.
DIANE ARBUS
Diane Arbus stands out as the central actor in the use of people with disabilities in art photography. More than any other photographer, she made people with disabilities central to her portfolio. Starting in the early 1970s, her photographs had a powerful effect on the art community (Bosworth 1984). The Museum of Modern Art launched a retrospective show of her work in 1972 (Arbus 1972). It had the largest attendance of any show in the museum’s history to that date. Her suicide just prior to this exhibit created an Arbus mystique within the generation of photographers who credit her as a major influence on their work. Critical and biographical writings about her make her ideas about her work more accessible than those of most modern photographers.
Arbus stated her personal view of her subjects, people she saw as outsiders and referred to as “freaks,”66 in a statement to a class she was teaching that one of her students taped. The statement was reprinted as the introduction to the monograph published in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art’s 1972 retrospective:
Freaks was [sic] 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. Like 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 traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats. (Arbus 1972, 3)
There is consensus in the art world that the volume in which this quote is found is one of the most important and influential photographic publications of all time. By 2004, more than three hundred thousand copies of it had sold, and it has remained continuously in print in the forty-eight years since its original publication (Parr and Badger 2004).
As I page through the catalog of human faces that is Diane Arbus’s legacy (Arbus 1972), I am overwhelmed by the sense that I am looking into a universe that exists out of synch with the “real world.” Her pictures are populated by dwarfs, giants, transvestites, strippers, circus performers, nudists, old people, and, perhaps of most interest to readers of this book, the inmates of an institution for people with intellectual disabilities.
Her pictures simultaneously grasp an intimate quality about her subjects while also introducing as a counterpoint a sense of them as profoundly different. They mirror her own ambivalence about the people she was photographing. She knew many of them—some on an intimate basis—for many years and photographed them on multiple occasions. Yet her statements make it clear that she always regarded them as freaks from whom she got an almost narcoticlike rush (see the introduction to Arbus 1972 and Bosworth 1984). Referring to her relationship with her subjects, she spoke of “pursuing” them, which implies an aggressive hunt for the right image (Bosworth 1984, 246).
From all of the pictures she took of Eddie Carmel, the “Jewish Giant,” she selected the one of him and his parents standing in their living room as the print to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (in Arbus 1972).77 The key to this selection lay in the expression on Carmel’s mother’s face. As Arbus stated, “You know how every mother has a nightmare when she is pregnant that the baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother’s face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, ‘OH MY GOD, NO!’” (quoted in Bosworth 1984, 194).
Arbus’s depiction of people with differences finds its fullest expression in the picture series she took of institutionalized people with intellectual disabilities (“Untitled” 1–7 [1970–71], in Arbus 1972; Arbus 1995).88 These photographs seem to reflect her point of view that all of us are weird and live behind a veil of normalcy that we fight to maintain. However, when her subjects are the residents of facilities for people with intellectual disabilities, the message the viewer gets is that for these people no veil exists. These inmates are set off as intrinsically different from the rest of humanity.
When Arbus’s developmentally disabled subjects are viewed with some of the other elements at work in the picture, the overall effect is distressing (see, for example, “Untitled” 7, in Arbus 1972). The quality of light is eerie. As the sequence of pictures progresses, a storm cloud gradually envelopes the open field where these people gather, conveying a sense of deep foreboding, even doom. None of them is dressed in clothes that would be considered appropriate for the situation. One wears a bathing suit, another a hospital gown, and another a Halloween costume. The subjects may not have on social masks, but many are wearing real masks. Witches, death heads, devils, and strange knights abound on this dark landscape. The sequence of these images, with a picture of a lone figure in a flowing sheet and a skull mask as the centerpiece (“Untitled” 3, in Arbus 1972), for me re-creates the Danse Macabre, the Dance of the Doomed as they prepare to enter hell.99
For Arbus, these subjects exist at the very fringe of the known world. They mark the limits of the universe of rationality, order, security, intellectuality, creativity, sociability, restraint, and good taste within which she was raised and lived. She described her disgust and revulsion as she forced herself to meet these people on their own turf. For her, it was a trip to another world; it “was really like Hades” (Arbus 1972, 14). Her pictures were trophies from these hunting expeditions in hell that attempted to make the power of this experience present to her audience in the affluent world of the modern American art consumer and to produce anxiety in them.
What do people in the art world say about these photographs of the developmentally disabled? In 1995, twenty-three years after the publication of the original Arbus monograph, her estate for the first time published a portfolio of fifty-one photographs of people with intellectual disabilities entitled “Untitled.” On its website, the publisher has the following description of the sixty-dollar volume: “Untitled may well be Diane Arbus’s most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of people and it demonstrates Arbus’s remarkable visual lyricism” (Aperture Foundation 2011).
This description stands in some contrast to a 1995 review by Nan Goldin, who places an interesting and puzzling spin on the reality of the photographed individuals’ experience of institutionalization. “The vision of a mentally disabled patient dressed as a ghost with a skeleton mask, or of a couple in a dunce hat and clown suit holding hands on a wide lawn under a dark somber sky, looks like Grimm’s fairy tales. The people become characters in a medieval theater or a Pirandello play. Somehow these pictures describe the experience of being institutionalized, not from a documentary viewpoint but from the magical and symbolic realm where reality sometimes arrives” (1995). In concluding her review, Goldin returns to the theme of the artist as the gifted creator who provides the viewers with the opportunity for a truly unique experience. Speaking about Arbus’s suicide, she suggests that perhaps in Arbus the audience faces an artist who truly plumbed the limits and perhaps even went beyond them. According to this art world rendering, to confront people with developmental disabilities is to plumb the limits of what one can bear.
Arbus and many of her colleagues commented that a person with a significant difference, including a disability, does not become a freak simply by going on the payroll at a sideshow; they are existentially freaks. Based on Arbus’s own words and on what we know from her biography, it is clear that regardless of how well she got to know her subjects, their world was always the world of the freaks, and hers was always the world of art (Arbus 1972; Bosworth 1984). She bridged the gap in search of powerful images, but the two worlds always remained separate.
RICHARD AVEDON
Diane Arbus is likely the most important photographer to regularly include people with disabilities in her images. As noted, they are central to her work. But other art world luminaries also dabbled in photographing people with disabilities as subjects. In such photographs, these people are mere extensions of the photographer’s approach and style.
Richard Avedon was a friend of Diane Arbus. Like many of the photographers who emerged as creative forces in the late 1950s and early 1960s art scene, Avedon mastered the craft of photography while working in the commercial sector of the medium. Until his death in 2004, he was regarded as one of the world’s premier fashion and portrait photographers. A Google search of his images or a visit to his foundation’s website provides a catalog of the most significant and familiar faces of the second half of the twentieth century.1010
In his photographs, Avedon concentrated on his subjects’ faces. Nowhere is this confrontation more clearly etched than in his series of portraits of his terminally ill father Jacob Israel Avedon (“Jacob Israel Avedon, Father of the Photographer,” in Avedon 1976).1111 As presented in a 1974 exhibition of the artist’s work, eight of these pictures in their square static format were enlarged to greater than life size and lined up on the wall of the Museum of Modern Art; they chronicled his father’s physical deterioration and the increasing pain caused by an incurable and debilitating disease. Although the subject is the photographer’s father, and he is dying, that relationship disappears from consideration as the viewer sees the subject’s glazed eyes, the whitening of his hair, the loosening clothes, and the transformation of his face as the bones become more prominent.
At various times in his career, Avedon undertook extended personal projects separate from his contracted work. At times, his personal work is indistinguishable from his commercial assignments (Malcolm 1980). There is a similarity between these personal photographs of his father and his 1963 “Mental Institution” series, which builds on the theme of the human face with a number of intense close-up studies of personal agony. A frequently reproduced image from this portfolio captures an African American man in a paroxysm of emotion (“Mental Institution 9 East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, February 15, 1963,” in Avedon 1964).1212
Every aspect of this picture speaks of unbearable tension. The subject is not statically placed in the center of the frame; instead, his head runs on a diagonal plane through the frame. He is wrapped in a crumpled blanket; one edge of the wrap has torn off and straps the top of his head. The flecks of white in his hair make the viewer wonder about his true age. Just a small part of a tightly clenched fist emerges from the blanket. But the central focus is the muscular structure of his face and the veins in his forehead, which stand out in sharp relief brought on by the clenched and grinding teeth and the furrowing in the brow and eyes.
Like Arbus’s pictures and those of other art photographers, these images of inmates in mental hospitals are not about the cruel institutional environment or about the suffering of a class of people with disabilities; they are about composition and style.
MARY ELLEN MARK
Mary Ellen Mark’s body of work parallels Avedon’s in a number of ways. She has received her greatest exposure through her portraiture work. This commercial work supports her in personal work as a photojournalist and documentarian with an art world following. She has produced a series of book-length photo essays on topics ranging from the work of Mother Teresa to the prostitutes of Bombay.1313
In the late 1970s, the first of these book-length essays, Ward 81 (Mark 1979), examined life on the secure women’s ward at the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Like so many who have taken their cameras into mental hospitals, Mark emerged with images that seem to echo Arbus’s experience of crossing into Hades. The pictures are art images, though. They concentrate on lighting and other aesthetic aspects of the work. Her subjects are prominent, but their institutional environment is not.
Mark’s images continually present the viewer with the questions, “What is it within this person that led them to crumble?” and “How come I can endure?” One picture of three people standing in front of a soda machine at a dance in the institution (illus. 9.4; in Marks 1979, 64) seems to say that a lack of social adaptability is the answer to the first question. All three face squarely into the camera. In the center is a woman wearing a floral print dress and a crocheted vest. She blankly stares and stands as if at attention. In contrast to her rigid posture, the two men on either side of her seem contorted with discomfort. The eyes of the man on the right side are wide, almost dazed looking, and he has a forced, tight-lipped smile on his face. A bearded man in a dark sweater appears almost belligerent. His head is bent toward the woman and tilted slightly forward so that he has to look up, from under his eyebrows, at the camera. Here, as in so many pictures from mental hospitals, the cue to the internal state is in the eyes: they are glazed, dazed, or belligerent.
Many of the pictures in Ward 81 demonstrate the uses of lighting—the photographer’s central tool—to create a compelling and challenging image. One image is particularly revealing in this respect (illus. 9.5; in Mark 1979, 85). Three women and an almost invisible male figure are shown in a dark institutional hallway. The women in the background are secondary—they almost disappear into the shadows. Center in the foreground is a woman with closely cropped hair, a patterned blouse, a white shawl, and a manacle on one wrist. Hidden in her shadow, a male figure seems to be adjusting her restraints. The use of flash from a low angle pulls the main subject out into space while creating a large, dark shadowing behind her. The light also catches an expression of utter exhaustion on her downcast face. This picture creates a disturbing mood of sinister foreboding. The photo essay provides no clue as to what fear is actually confronting this woman (Is she waiting to receive electroshock therapy?) other than the grouping of this image with others that show people in various forms of restraint.
Although many of the photos taken in institutions present images of pain, another recurring theme is the escape or hiding from human contact. In one of Mark’s pictures, a woman seems to be experiencing as much pain as the man in Avedon’s picture, but here the emphasis is on separation (illus. 9.6; in Mark 1979, 73). The woman is behind the head of a bed staring at the ceiling with one hand over her mouth and a tearful expression on her face. The picture was taken with a wide-angle lens from the foot of the bed and creates the visual illusion of a white cone with the woman seated at the summit.
No photographic documentary text helps the viewer really understand the plight of the mentally ill in large public institutions. The subject’s experience is removed from the context of his or her life and placed in the world of art.
EUGENE MEATYARD
A simple description of Eugene Meatyard’s work can make it sound like a collection of silly little tableaux in which masks, dolls, and children are brought together in old buildings, forests, or fields. Yet in the art world these pictures work as very serious, often disturbing visual probes into the human psyche (Coke 1991). Different from the images discussed so far here, his work is an example of the use of disability in surrealist and fantasy images. Although real disability appears only occasionally in Meatyard’s photographs, he is a master at using grotesque masks and other devices within his finely orchestrated pictures to create the illusion of significant physical difference and deep-seated unease.
Like filmmakers who create horror movies, some photographers use disability in a surrealistic mode in their work. Meatyard capitalizes on physical difference to create a sense of foreboding in his contrived images. The image in a 1960 picture by Meatyard (in Meatyard 1970) offers a good example of this approach. In this very dark picture set in a stone entryway, a short figure sits leaning on the wall. The size and structure of this dark, clothed body indicates a child, yet the face is of a very old man with sunken eyes and deep wrinkles. The head is disproportionately large for the body. At the waist, the head and arms of a doll project from the figure’s right hand.1414
In addition to masks and lighting, Meatyard frequently makes use of controlled blurring. In his case, blurring is about psychological instability. In his 1962 “Occasion for Diriment,” a short male figure in a light-colored, pullover shirt stands in front of a plank shack to the right of the frame. He wears a grotesque mask. On the left is a small girl waving her arms and bobbing her head in a rapid motion, which blurs all her features into a human face that roughly duplicates the deformity of the mask.1515
Meatyard was also particularly adept at creating and using real people with disabilities in his strange images. In an untitled picture, the exterior of an old cabin and a dark doorway are the background. A one-handed man reaches out to what seems to be a woman’s hand on the right. It is not clear, however, whether the latter belongs to a person or a mannequin (Meatyard, 1974, 9).1616
LES KRIMS
Les Krims is typical of the generation that came to the forefront in the art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He, like many of his contemporaries, owes his identity as a photographer to the creative openness that emerged in the medium from 1960 on. He learned his craft in art school, teaches in a college art department, and sees himself as an artist who uses photography as his medium (personal communication from Krims to the author, 1974). The major influences on his work, surrealism and pop art, come from outside of photography (Rosenblum 1984). The principal photographic roots for his imagery include such unlikely sources as police and medical photographs and snapshots of hunting trips. Like Meatyard’s pictures, some of Krims’s elaborately staged images hearken back to the tableau vivant pictures of the nineteenth century (Coleman 1977). His pictures serve different purposes and excite diverse responses.
Many people with disabilities are present in Krims’s strange and often abrasive images. In “Human Being as a Piece of Sculpture Fiction” (reproduced in Coleman 1977, 89), an African American man who has no legs is seated on a pedestal in front of three bay windows in a sparsely furnished room. The picture was made with a wide-angle lens, which distorts the space, enabling us to look down on the central figure and still take in the alcove containing his pedestal. The picture is printed on a high-contrast paper, which breaks down the image’s continuous tone quality and emphasizes the negative’s grain structure. The man on the pedestal grasps it tightly, leans forward toward the window, and screams. Like Avedon’s picture from the mental institution, this carefully constructed tableau is a metaphor for loneliness and alienation. From Krims’s perspective, however, the absence of legs is merely a convenient device with strong power.1717
In 1971, Krims produced a set of photographs of dwarfs published as Little People of America. Jonathan Green attacks Krims in American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (1984) for his “juvenile” use of visual puns and jokes at his subjects’ expense. Yet although Green is critical of certain aspects of Little People of America (see the example reproduced in Coleman 1977, 46), he hails it as opening up, albeit with a mocking attitude, previously taboo subject matter for the creative photographer. He accepts the underlying rationale for this type of work by articulating the mythology of the dwarf, which lends Krims’s images credibility as an essay on the limits of full membership in the human community. “The dwarf became the dominant image for alienation, for the grotesque and the repulsive. He was the walking human contradiction: part myth, part person, the visual embodiment of all our cultural fears of disease, difference, and deformity. He was a creature known to exist but psychologically difficult to confront or acknowledge. The dwarf was the prototypical social outcast, partaking in human life without a normal human shape” (Green 1984, 120–21).
As has occurred so often in this discussion of the photographic image of people with a disability, Green locates meaning in the person in the picture. From this perspective, the limits of existence are not the effect of social conditions; they are part of the person. For Green, the dwarf really is the other.
ROBERT D’ALESSANDRO
Robert D’Alessandro1818 has worked as a street photographer in the tradition of Winogrand. I saved Robert D’Alessadro’s work until the end of the chapter because his motivation in producing the photos was similar to that of the photographer who leads the chapter, W. Eugene Smith, whose work documents the suffering caused by industrial pollution in Japan.
In a picture entitled “Fourteenth Street, NYC, 1971” (illus. 9.7; in D’Alessandro 1973), D’Alessandro shows us the front of an office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Three people with disabilities are on the sidewalk. To the left of the door is an American flag. An elderly man with a cane is bent over. A younger man who has no legs is seated on the sidewalk closest to the camera. Nearest to the door is a man in a wheelchair. This man and the man seated on the sidewalk are looking to the right as a number of nondisabled people walk rapidly toward them and into the picture. The tension created by the difference in pace and direction of the people with and without disabilities sets the tone of this image. There is a sense that the people with a disability are being swept away or trampled by the onslaught of fully ambulatory people.
Although there is a sense in which D’Alessandro is presenting a sympathetic image of the plight of the three men with disabilities, people in the art world argue that his primary concern was to create an intriguing image by showing these men as a counterpoint to the rapidly moving legs. This tension is indeed intrinsic to the image, but it reduces the people with disabilities to a visual component.
In his book of photographs Glory (1973), D’Alessandro develops a highly personal surrealistic examination of how people use the American flag. The photos in that book are a product of the Vietnam era and are meant as a serious critique of America during that time. One of the most powerful images, “Flushing, NY, 1972” (illus. 9.8), takes viewers to the extreme of the conventions found in photographs of amputees by displaying the stumps of two severed limbs. The picture is done in the subject’s living room. He sits in the center of the frame on a couch that is covered with the flag. The man, who has shoulder-length hair and is naked, has removed both of his prostheses. With his hands folded in front of him, he leans forward. The light coming through a window in front of him casts long, barlike shadows across the floor and the man’s lower torso. Outside this area of bright light, the room recedes into deep shadows. In this picture, light, so often a symbol of freedom, is transformed into symbolic bars imprisoning this man. Art world commentary, however, does not focus on the plight of the veteran or others like him; it focuses on the aesthetics of the image.
Although one would not necessarily know from looking at D’Alessadro’s images that he saw himself as a documentary photographer motivated to point out injustice in an effort to contribute to social change, that was at least in part how he saw his work. I did not know this until he shared the diary notes he wrote at the time he took the pictures in Glory. Prior to taking the pictures, he had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the slums of Brazil. He was back living in New York and trying to sort out his life. He spied the people pictured in “Fourteenth Street” from his apartment window. His mind raced back to Brazil, where the sight of destitute people with disabilities on the streets was common. The American flag hanging out over the office jolted him into realizing that what he was seeing was not Brazil; it was the United States. “We don’t have people in that situation here, do we?” he said to himself. Although not clear about what his discomfort with the scene meant, through his camera he wanted to tell people about the view that distressed him.
The circumstances surrounding the D’Alessandro picture of the amputee was quite different. D’Alessandro wanted to make a photograph that would very clearly show what the Vietnam War was doing to those who were fighting over there; he wanted to bring attention to their plight. He called the Vietnam Veterans Association, seeking disabled veterans. The person pictured in illustration 9.9, Billy, volunteered as a subject. Both of Billy’s legs had been blown off by a land mine in Vietnam. When he first returned to the United States, he was active in the Veterans Against the War movement. He was one of the veterans who protested during the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1968 and had seen demonstrators beaten by law enforcement agents.1919 When D’Alessandro took the picture, Billy was fed up with America and preparing to move to Mexico. He eventually became a heroin addict and died of causes related to his addiction.
D’Alessandro laments that people in the art world have pushed aside the social content of his photographs to emphasize form and style. He understands that once a photograph becomes an art object, the photographer loses control of its meaning, but he identifies more with Eugene Smith than with those photographers anchored in the art world.
CONCLUSION
Critics and others try to answer the question why images of people with physiological and psychological differences proliferated in the art photography of the 1960s and onward. This trend certainly was not a nefarious plot by photographers against people with disabilities. The mere presence of people with a disability in the work of highly regarded photographers was enough for some to call these artists humanists. A more tenable answer is that this was a period when the “freak” became popular. Young people adopted the word freak to express their alienation from the dominant culture’s lifestyles, mores, and values (Fiedler 1978). To be a freak was a badge of honor, a mark of rejection by a war-mongering and decadent society. Within the 1960s cultural framework, photographers who identified with the values of the counterculture photographed people whom they saw as being outside the dominant culture—freaks.
There is some validity in attributing the subject matter of pictures to the tenor of the times. The popularity of these images of “freaks” in the late 1960s and 1970s was likely related to the unrest of the time. However, many of Arbus’s pictures, many of Avedon’s confrontational portraits and his mental institution series, a large portion of Winogrand’s work, most of Meatyard’s pictures, and images by other photographers in this period were made before the emergence of a freak counterculture. In addition, the representation of people with disabilities in these photographs—in contrast to Smith’s work—does not suggest that the photographers embraced these people as kin.
Forces were at work within the art world that need to be considered. A. D. Coleman connects the emergence of a new type of photographic imagery with the coming of a new generation of photographers who saw themselves primarily as artists, were well trained photographically, and had strong connections with the world of art. In many ways, these photographers were seeking an answer to the perennial question directed at photography: “But can you call it Art?” Stieglitz’s answer forty years earlier needed to be reformulated.
The environment in which Arbus, Avedon, Winogrand, and many others formed their mature vision as artists was the relatively small world of the New York art scene in the late 1950s (see Bosworth 1984; Gablik 1984; Welch 1986). New York in the 1950s was a hotbed of photographic activity (Welch 1986). Many individuals who identified themselves as artists with a camera sought an approach that had the power of social vision yet would stand independent of the dominant perception of photography primarily as journalism. The perspective growing out of this environment and the endorsement by the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art under the directorship of John Szarkowski in the post-1962 period fostered the growth of the casting of people with a disability in most of photography (Szarkowski 1978).
Important in understanding the use of disability in art photography is the influential critic Harold Rosenberg’s (1964) concept of the “Anxious Object.” The Anxious Object is found in disturbing images, the grotesque, the weirdly fantastic, and the freak show. Rosenberg argues that the Anxious Object is one of the hallmarks of modern art. It is intended to provoke discomfort, uncertainty, and anxiety by challenging the viewer’s expectations. By creating tension and ambiguity, an Anxious Object demands a response from the viewer. It seeks to subvert a routine way of looking and to challenge the viewer to rethink his or her way of thinking.
The reviews by Coleman, Colombo, and Green of the photographers discussed here make it clear that in the post-1960 period a substantial number of photographic artists made a conscious decision to use provocative subject matter to produce images that were upsetting and produced anxiety. For many of these photographers, people with disabilities were the provocative subject matter. The decision to use such people in this manner may not have been conscious or reprehensible. A picture of a dwarf or an amputee was synonymous with “a powerful image.” That was by way of saying that the picture would be shocking.
The relegating of people with a disability to the role of provocateur was supported by the art world’s definition of the artist. The artist, by definition, is uniquely qualified to challenge the public’s preconceived perceptions in any way he or she sees fit. Of course, artists are not autonomous; they, like everyone else, are part of a culture that has stereotypes of people with disabilities. Like most of the general public, artists define people with a disability as fundamentally different. The only preexisting frame of reference that photographers have for understanding is their prejudices. Many of the artists in the period discussed here approached the disabled as creatures who inhabited the outer reaches of the known world, away from “normal” people and especially away from people like themselves who are defined as gifted.
In the period 1965–80, during which most of the photos I have examined were made, the images created by some of the world’s foremost photographic talents served to reify the concept of people with a disability as the personification of the outsider. The images reviewed here communicate a message of fundamental difference, dependence, and segregation. Such a message flies in the face of the efforts by many people with a disability to gain recognition of their mutual interdependence, economic independence, rights, and integration.
1. For example, Margret Bourke-White’s public-relations photos of Letchworth Village (see chapter 5) might easily be resurrected into art if a curator framed them as such. Although Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson do not focus on art museums in their discussion of disability and museums, their book Re-presenting Disability (2010) raises interesting and important issues in regard to disability activism and agency in museums.
2. I use the term art world to refer of all the people and places involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art (as in Becker 1982). The art world is held together by a belief in the concepts of “art” and “artist.” Although it spans the globe, it is largely a Western institution that clusters in cities such as New York, London, and Berlin.
3. This image can be found online at http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5236759. It is also reproduced in Rosenblum 1984, 512.
4. Formalism in art refers to the idea that aesthetic value is entirely determined by its form, not by its context and content.
5. The term naturalist refers to works of art that show subjects in the natural form in their natural environment.
6. In the 1960s, freak was a term associated with members of the hippy and beatnik movement. In that context, it was not necessarily as negative as it is today.
7. See Millet 2004 for a discussion of Carmel and the Arbus photograph of him. The image can be found online at http://dianearbus-photography.com and in Arbus 1972.
8. These images can be found online at http://diane-arbus-photography.com and in Arbus 1972.
9. This image can be found online at http://diane-arbus-photography.com and in Arbus 1972.
10. Avedon’s website is at http://www.richardavedon.com.
11. Search the Internet using “Jacob Israel Avedon” to view the images of Avedon’s father.
12. Also see http://www.richardavedon.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=6&p=5&a=2&at=0.
13. See the listing of Mark’s publications on her website at http://www.maryellenmark.com/books.
14. This image can be found online at http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/index.php/artists/RalphEugeneMeatyard/romances/26.
15. This image can found online at http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/photographs/occasion_for_diriment_ralph_eugene_meatyard/objectview_zoom.aspx?page=3&sort=6&sortdir=asc&keyword=meatyard&fp=1&dd1=19&dd2=0&vw=1&collID=19&OID=190023049&vT=1&hi=0&ov=0 and in Tannenbaum 1991.
16. This image can be found online at http://www.masters-of-photography.com/M/meatyard/meatyard_hands.html and in Meatyard 1974.
17. This image can be found online at http://www.leskrims.com/leskrims2.html.
18. The Getterman Gallery in New York City carries D’Alessandro’s work.
19. Although the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 were more widely covered by the press and most discussed, there were demonstrations at the Republican National Convention as well.
