Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum review – A strangely bleak but brutally honest vision of humanity | Diane Arbus

IIn 1971, American photographer Diane Arbus committed suicide at the age of 48. Someone had to see the evidence, because my photography isn’t so much tragic as it is completely alienated from the human race. Here is a woman breastfeeding her child, a modern-day Madonna—except that the woman’s limbs are as thin as those of an addict, her face is pale, and the infant resting in her arms, dressed in baby clothes, is a monkey. Just to make it clear that this was a dystopian parody of the Virgin and motherhood, Arbus captioned it: “Woman with her Little Monkey, New Jersey, 1971.” It is an absolutely pathetic picture of desperation, of someone trying to make sense of a life that cannot be understood. The despair reflects Arbus’ own condition.

You might like to see several of her positively gender-blurring photos. There’s a photo called Transvestite at her birthday party, New York City in 1969: her lying on her bed laughing, with a double chin and gapped teeth and wearing a blond wig, in a shabby hotel room with balloons. But Arbus said matter-of-factly how appalling and pathetic she found the occasion: “She called me and said it was her birthday party and I was going to come, and I said, ‘How wonderful.’ It was a hotel on Broadway and 100th Street… I had been to some pretty terrible places but the lobby was really like an abyss. The elevator was broken so Arbus went up to the fourth floor. “You had to get past about three or four people on each trip. Then she entered her room. “It was a birthday party of me, her, her prostitute friend, her pimp, and the cake.”

It wasn’t that Arbus didn’t love or admire her friend. But she saw how poor and lonely her life had been and mercilessly depicted that sad truth as she saw it, not her small moments of triumph. Arbus portrayed her as eccentric because she saw everyone who interested her as eccentric (a word she used). There’s even an image of a child here who manages to be pessimistic and despondent, seeing a fleshy mess of potential flaws in that unformed face – and he’s a freak.

When Arbus was catapulted to artistic stardom with a posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972, the cultural critic Susan Sontag objected. She wrote a wonderful essay condemning Arbus for dwelling on misery and ugliness, and dismissing her work as anti-humanist. Sontag was right about the morality of these images. But I do not agree that art should be humanistic. It just has to have a strong, memorable vision. If Arbus was a bad artist, then so were Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, and Velázquez, all of whom shared her downcast eye. To be a terrible, lowly, depressed person, and show that your art is not a failure – if the art is as painful and unforgettable as Arbus’s.

The scary reason she’s so good is because her eyes are real. I met a couple of people on this show and saw their real faces in memory from her footage. I spoke to Norman Mailer in my bad first semester at university when I stumbled into a meeting after the event: I can’t remember what we talked about but I remember how nice he was. It flashes to Arbus too. As for Gerard Malanga, whom I met much later, he embodies the sexy cool of the Velvet Underground whip dancer in his youthful glory. I believe these pictures.

Arbus can see beauty. She found nothing wrong with Marcello Mastroianni lying on his bed in the hotel room. And the semi-naked Mia Farrow doesn’t look pristine. But these are not her best works, these are photographs of celebrities that could be taken by thousands of people. When Arbus photographs the rest of us, those whom the camera does not love, she can do what very few photographers achieve and reveal a personal, if strangely bleak, vision of life.

Look at the little man in the arms of his tall dominatrix, embracing perhaps the only person who brings happiness into his life, when she cracks the whip and heals his heart. Feast your eyes on a nudist family, with a teenage daughter forced to share her parents’ lifestyle. There is age, of course. The harshest images here are of wealthy elderly widows, clearly sought after by Arbus as keenly as the nudes. They live on dried skin mummified under jewelry. Lady T. Charlton-Henry, photographed in 1965, looks literally dead as she sits in a dress with a skeletal cuff, her hand resting on her chair. I challenge you to find something positive in this.

Arbus had a sensual eye for beauty, but she finds ugliness all around her, which scratches her soul. She sees every flaw, every bad haircut, and decaying face. You see the monkey’s little hand touching his “mother” in a final, painful detail of twisted love. What a monster, what a genius.