Outward Signs of Inner Mysteries

Summary

Outward Signs of Inner MysteriesEric Gudas on the work and afterlife of the misunderstood photographer Diane Arbus.LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!THE BARE-CHESTED MAN emanates light. Even the gray-tipped stubble on his chin and sunken cheeks sparks into the dusk. Behind him, a gloomy sky bears down; over his right shoulder, three flags ripple atop a carnival tent, where the letters “E E,” half an “I,” and the smaller “r e” hint at “eerie.” His lined face, the cigarette-smoking skull inked on his bald scalp, the scythe-wielding figure bulging on his right cheek: all embody a memento mori. But he stands, adamant, in a power pose before the camera—the ritual stance of his profession—to display his muscled torso and upper arms that swarm with tattoos. Stars rise from a bird whose outspread wings echo the V of his plunging collarbones, while the dark patch of hair that bristles from his chest and narrows to a line forms another downward-plunging shape. A snake’s head, with rounded eye, coils around his rib cage, its length disappearing into the murk below him. But I return to his eyes, fixed on mine, their irises ablaze, each dark pupil dotted with a pinprick of light. Those eyes—below the deep fissure that parts his eyebrows, set in wrinkles inked by time—burn so hard that they almost sear a hole in the photographic paper.¤I encountered Diane Arbus’s Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970 during the Los Angeles run of Cataclysm at David Zwirner. Subtitled The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, the exhibition, jointly organized with the Fraenkel Gallery, restaged the moment when Arbus’s work collided with a mainstream audience. Cataclysm presented all 113 photos from Diane Arbus, the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective, which opened Ele...