Diane Arbus retrospective

When I was on my way to Paris for the first time in October I spent most of the way on the Eurostar stewing about the fact that the Parisienne sitting next to me had taken my window seat! Not that I was missing out on seeing anything as it was already dark but it was the principal!

To whittle away the time I read the Eurostar Magazine cover to cover. I noticed a small article about a Diane Arbus exhibition that was coming up in Paris. Ooh lala! Diane Arbus was such an influential photographer that I studied and discussed at university, I was so excited that I might get to see an exhibition of hers.

Oh but it hadn’t started yet, the opening weekend was the one after I was there! Nuts!

As luck would have it the same friend that invited me to Paris in October invited me again two weeks ago, to come and stay with her while she is in France for work. And we just managed to catch the exhibition in its last weekend! Such luck!

The exhibition was a retrospective of over 200 of her images.

Her photographs are mostly of people on the fringe of society – transvestites, midgets, people with mental disabilities, nudists – they type of people that mainstream society doesn’t like to see.

The retrospective included two rooms with notebooks, cameras, contact sheets and books from Arbus’ life. I remember seeing a photo of her taking a photo. She used a medium format camera, which I knew but I’d forgotten that when you are photographing with that type of camera you look down from about waist height through the viewfinder instead of from the back of the camera.

I wonder if this type of camera helped her to get closer to her subjects in some ways… a camera can often work as a barrier – it’s something between you and your subject. If she wasn’t staring directly at who she was photographing, almost not looking at them in a way, it might have helped her to capture the stark and real shots that she created.

You can see some of her work here