Diane Arbus and the Nudists

Much has been made of Diana Arbus' photographs of the mentally disabled: accusations of exploitation or at least insensitivity on her part. I might argue that her motives in taking the pictures are largely irrelevant--that the pictures stand on their own regardless of the photographer's intent--but I'm too distracted to join the fray. It's all the naked people who have my attention.

As nudes go, they're not much to look at at first. Accustomed to the plasticized and the airbrushed as we are, we might not know what to make of such real bodies. A few of them might be considered attractive, but that seems besides the point. Take a look through the collection in Revelations. The pitifully scrawny, the average, and the obese all have one thing in common: each of the individuals photographed is utterly, completely comfortable in his or her own skin. That's what makes them fascinating to see. If Adam and Eve really did eat the apple, it's news to them.

The bodies I speak of were photographed primarily at nudist colonies, the whole enterprise of which seems to be a recovery of that mythological time before the Fall. After all, it was Adam and Eve's awareness of their own nakedness that betrayed them: "Who told you that you were naked?" My favorite photograph in this series shows a husband and wife in late middle age, resplendent in their shoes, in their cabin at a nudist camp. The man is the perfect picture of scrawniness, with thick-framed spectacles. The woman is sprightly, a little bit of style and sass in her pose. In short, the two look happy.

Of course, Arbus also photographed strippers and transvestites. She chronicled all sorts of people. In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1963--the same year she shot photos in nudist camps--Arbus expressed the wish to document the "considerable ceremonies of our present." Of the present, she said, "its innumerable habits lie in wait for their meaning"--a statement that seems to suggest that the establishment of meaning is a retrospective act. There is, I suppose, no other way for a photographer to look at it.