The pictures of the American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) transform the ordinary into the foreign and uncover the familiar in the foreign. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” explained the artist herself, “the more she tells you, the less you know.” She was a collector of the curious: Her photographs of nudists, striptease dancers and passers-by made her famous. The American asked her models to pose, but posing, it seems, brought a haunting naturalness out of the portrayed.
“For me, the motif of a picture is always more important than the picture itself. And more complicated,” said Arbus. She only held onto scenes that she believed no one else would notice. The gracefully smoking transvestite in the well-known picture “Young man with hair curlers at home” (1966) or the “Jewish giant at home with his parents” (1970) provoke an embarrassment about one’s own curiosity even today.
New York is now commemorating the pioneer of street photography with a statue: The statue by British artist Gillian Wearing has been on view at the southeast entrance of Central Park in Manhattan since Wednesday. Shortly after the roughly life-size bronze was erected and held in place by a camera hanging around its neck, people passing by began to interact with the work – they photographed the statue and themselves next to it or put an arm around its shoulder. The installation, which should be on view until August 2022, was organized by the Public Art Fund, which looks after art in public spaces in New York.
Gillian Wearing was one of the in the 1990s Young British Artists. She was best known for a series of photos in which passers-by made personal confessions on signs and held them into the camera – “a photograph is a secret about a secret”. In a video work, the artist staged herself as Diane Arbus, whom she and Robert Mapplethorpe counted as part of her “spiritual family” and imitated with the help of masks and clothing.
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