Constellation, the enormous new show of photographer Diane Arbus’s life work, aims to present the artist as no one has seen her before. Embracing randomness, this exhibition of a full set of 454 master prints from Arbus’s only authorized printmaker, Neil Selkirk, tries its best to give audiences a completely unstructured presentation of the photos.
“I wanted to make sure that it was as mixed up as possible,” the show’s curator, Matthieu Humery, told me. “I didn’t want to make any specific connections between images. I tried to keep out any kind of narratives so that visitors create their own narratives. There is this magic madness.”
Constellation grew out of a 2011 acquisition made by the Luma Foundation of Arbus’s prints, many of them unpublished and rarely viewed. With prices for individual Arbus prints ranging into the six figures, it was a blockbuster, and expensive, deal – such an acquisition demanded a bold show.
While mulling the potential exhibition, Humery’s thoughts went to the Met’s major 2005 Arbus retrospective, Revelation, and he recognized that he didn’t want to work the same ground. “The question was how to present this group of images without doing a classic retrospective, since it had already happened,” he said. “I thought it would be great to show everything at once. I was in the New York subway, looking at the map of the subway, and I saw that grid and thought, ‘Maybe we could have this sort of grid and present all the images that way.’”
The result of Humery’s inspiration is a remarkable, scaffolding-like series of structures that allows him to hang the hundreds of photographs while removing any walls from the exhibition space. Audiences at once become both viewers of the art and voyeurs of each another – it is impossible to see the exhibition without also making observations of fellow show-goers.
Seeing any sizable body of work in this way can be overwhelming, and even more so with Arbus. Her portraits seek out the ways in which humanity can be perplexing, illegible or even incongruous to our notions of human experience. Viewing an Arbus photo can evoke genuine feelings of dislocation and distress, at the same time also bringing forth empathy and connection. The opportunity to experience this without traditional handholds, such as chronology, context or interpretation, is to be doubly thrown into a body of work that has not lost its capacity to haunt our psyches, even after half a century.
For his own part, Humery found it challenging to let go of all the typical accoutrements that would come along with a major show of a world-class photographer. His solution was to immerse himself within the photographs to incarnate his vision. “It was kind of difficult in the beginning, just to have something in my mind, and to translate that into reality,” he said. “I really wanted to do it myself and to experiment with the display myself, so it took me like two weeks. I was locked in there for two weeks.”
If there is a concession to order that Humery made, it is in Arbus’s portrait of artistic mentor and lifelong love interest Marvin Israel. The photo – a rather somber, full-body shot of Israel in a sweater and slacks, hands in pockets, looking lonely in the distance – is given pride of place, situated above all other shots. “The way I placed him, he’s the highest figure in the show, dominating everything,” Humery said. “He was the one really who pushed Arbus a lot to give her the strength to do the pictures the way she wanted to do it. He was also the one who initiated the retrospective at the Moma when she died.”
Humery’s other concession to order was to create a “secret room” within the show to exhibit Arbus’s so-called box of 10. A project that Arbus worked on in the last years of her life, the box of 10 collects some of her most enduring photos – including her shot of identical twins made in Roselle, New Jersey, and a young man wearing curlers, shot in his home in New York City – into a plexiglass container, originally priced at $1,000.
The box of 10 was a transformational piece, helping confer on Arbus the honor of being the first photographer to be featured in the influential art magazine Artforum, and it has come to be seen as part of a larger turning point when photography was at last taken seriously as art. Arbus only completed eight out of a projected run of 50 boxes, selling just four before her death – among the purchasers were photographer Richard Avedon and artist Jasper Johns.
“It’s kind of like a secret room within Constellation,” Humery said. “The box of 10 was really something very unique at the time, the idea of Arbus looking back at her own work and making a selection of 10 photographs to put into this plexiglass box. That’s when things turn for her, because of this box of 10. All of these images together, they’re so strong together, so that’s the only moment in the show when I didn’t want to spread it out.”
During the show’s run in in Arles, France, Constellation attracted the attention of German film-maker Wim Wenders, who was bemused at how the format let him take in people’s reactions to Arbus’s photos. “Wim Wenders looked at the show, and he said, ‘You know what’s very beautiful is to see people looking at pictures,’” Humery said. “Most of the time in a museum show you see people from behind, but in this case you see people from every angle, and it’s kind of beautiful to see people looking at the pictures. Wenders said that he would love to come back and take pictures of people looking at the pictures.”
Humery sees his show, the most comprehensive exhibition of Arbus’s photographs that has ever been staged, as both a tribute to Arbus herself and a way to better understand one of the medium’s greatest practitioners. “I wanted to create a show that was at her level, that’s a reflection of who she was,” he said. “For me, all these portraits together comprise the portrait of Diane Arbus. It’s like her looking at herself in a mirror. It’s like a way to make a portrait of her that you discover for yourself.”
Diane Arbus: Constellation is on show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from 5 June to 17 August