Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  Weaver’s characterization of Cameron as a genius does not seem to me exaggerated in regard to her grasp of the possibilities offered by photography for transcendent formal achievement. “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me,” Cameron wrote in her Annals. Every amateur photographer knows this feeling. But only a few amateurs (Lartigue is another) have understood what is involved in this arrest. For a beautiful child’s beauty to survive the camera’s withering gaze, much propitiatory activity by the photographer is required. Cameron knew, for example, that the clothes children normally wear (in Victorian times no less than in ours) are among the camera’s most potent weapons against the pedophilia of the photographing aunt or grandmother. Instead of a beautiful child, the camera will deliver a competition between a face and a dress or snowsuit, a clash between the delicacy and translucency of young skin and the coarse materiality of fashionable dress. A great-niece of Cameron’s named Laura Gurney recalled the day when she and her sister Rachel were “pressed into the service of the camera [as] . . . two Angels of the Nativity, and to sustain them we were scantily clad and each had a heavy pair of swan wings fastened to her narrow shoulders, while Aunt Julia, with ungentle hand, tousled our hair to get rid of its prim nursery look.” But clearly Aunt Julia knew what she was doing to give her vision of childhood beauty its best possible shot at being transmitted onto the wet glass plate. If it would be too much to say that Cameron chose religious and literary themes simply as an escape from Victorian costume, there is no question that her draperies and veils and turbans and crowns and coats of mail gave her a considerable aesthetic advantage over the studio photographers and fellow amateurs who took their sitters as they came.

  Cameron had other strategies for throwing a veil of romance over the zany goings-on in the chicken house. In her essay “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,”* Carol Armstrong wonderfully reads a photograph of old Mr. Cameron, dressed as Merlin, posed with an unknown sitter dressed as the sorceress Vivien (who is pointing a finger at Charles’s head as if it were a lady’s small revolver), as “an allegorical figuration of Cameron herself as photographic sorceress, quite a bit younger than her husband, directing the bemused patriarch to hold his pose, commanding him to be still (and stop his giggling), and magically, indexically, enchanting him, transforming him into Merlin, all through the bewitching witchcraft of photography.”

  One of Cameron’s most potent spells was the soft focus into which—at first unwittingly (she evidently initially had the wrong lens for her camera) and then by design—she consistently cast her images. One has only to imagine her fancy-subject pictures as taken by Richard Avedon’s or Annie Leibovitz’s pitilessly sharp lenses to understand the role soft focus plays in the sense these pictures give of being traces of impossible dreams rather than mere laughable attempts to fool the eye. Cameron’s lighting further heightens the oneiric character of her work. She kept her glass house fairly dark, which prolonged the torture of the sittings but permitted her to put into play what Quentin Bell called her “Venetian understanding of chiaroscuro.” A photograph called The Passing of Arthur, which has often been jeered at for its artificiality and theatricality, and which Gernsheim holds up as one of the very worst of the fancy-subject pictures, has always given me a secret thrill, to which I now feel free to confess. The picture shows, in Gernsheim’s derisively vivid description,

  the mortally wounded king [lying] in the stately barge (a simple makeshift boat with broomsticks for mast and oar jutting out into the white muslin curtains representing water), resting his head in the lap of one of the Queens, and looking rather suspicious of his strange surroundings. Unfortunately the boat is too small to contain the three mourning Queens, so the other two have to stand behind it. Half a dozen villagers muffled in monks’ cowls made by Mrs. Cameron’s maids lurk in the background . . .

  But the accompanying illustration does not support Gernsheim’s mockery. Far from looking ridiculous, The Passing of Arthur is a kind of crowning image of Cameron’s imaginative enterprise. Yes, the broomsticks and the muslin curtains are there, but they are insignificant. For once, the homely truth of the sitting gives right of place to the romantic fantasy of its director. The picture, a night scene, is magical and mysterious. Gernsheim compared Cameron’s fancy-subject pictures to poor amateur theatricals. The Passing of Arthur puts me in mind of good amateur theatricals I have seen, and recall with shameless delight.

  Cameron is reported to have said—on the occasion of declining to photograph Mrs. Charles Darwin—that “no woman must be photographed between the ages of eighteen and seventy.” How firmly Cameron adhered to her program of ruthless ageism is evident from the Cameron’s Women show, in which one dewily fresh young woman after another is on view. These are the “fair women” of the Hogarth Press monograph, who now reappear unescorted. Sylvia Wolf, accounting for her decision to banish the “famous men,” writes that she finds Cameron’s portraits of women “different from her portraits of men—more complex and enigmatic somehow.”

  However, in one respect at least, the portraits of the famous men (who are middle-aged or elderly) and those of the fair women are not dissimilar: both reflect Cameron’s love of hair. Her close-ups of Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Longfellow, Taylor, Watts, and Charles Cameron are as much celebrations of beards as of Victorian eminence. (In the case of her remarkable portrait of Sir John Herschel, who was clean-shaven, Cameron made the seventy-five-year-old astronomer wash his white hair before the sitting so that it would fly out to form a kind of mad scientist’s shock around his head.) Hair is similarly prominent in the portraits of Mary Ann Hillier (who was Cameron’s parlor maid and posed for her as the Mother of God so frequently that she was called Madonna around the house), Cyllena Wilson (an adopted daughter), Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll’s Alice, now grown), Annie Chinery (Cameron’s daughter-in-law), Mary Ryan (another maid), May Prinsep (a niece), and Julia Jackson (another niece and future mother of Virginia Woolf), who, among others, form the cast of the Cameron’s Women show. Like the little girls whose hair was mussed to rid it of its prim nursery look, the bigger girls were made to undo their buns and chignons so that their hair would poetically stream or flow or twist around their faces.

  A profile portrait of Hillier, entitled The Angel at the Tomb, in which a massive tangle of freshly washed hair occupies half the frame, could serve as a companion piece for the Herschel portrait. In two portraits of Alice Liddell, entitled, respectively, Pomona and Alethea, the boundary between a dense profusion of leaves and flowers and the sitter’s long, loose hair is breached—as if to express Cameron’s Morris-like delight in all things that grow and twine.

  Her practice of portraying the famous men in their own illustrious person while (with some exceptions) rendering the fair women as biblical or literary characters might suggest a certain sexism.* But the photographs themselves tell a more egalitarian story. They show no evidence that Cameron’s heart beat any less rapidly and jumpily when she photographed her maid than when she photographed the poet laureate. Perhaps she dared less with men in the hair-mussing and clothes-changing department (though she did manage to throw a gray blanket across Tennyson’s shoulders and possibly even to tousle his hair when she took the photograph that came to be known as the Dirty Monk portrait). But the intensity of the photographer-subject relationship was no less in the case of the servant than in that of the great man.

  In 1864, her fellow amateur photographer Lewis Carroll visited the Isle of Wight and wrote to his sister about a “mutual exhibition of photographs” he had had with Cameron. “Hers are all taken purposely out of focus—some are very picturesque—some merely hideous—however, she talks of them as if they were triumphs of art.” Certainly Cameron never doubted herself. In her Annals she found it “too comical” that Tennyson should have preferred a portrait of himself by a studio photographer named Mayall to her Dirty Monk portrait. She dismissed a devastating review of her work in The Journa
l of the Photographic Society of London, writing: “[It] would have dispirited me very much had I not valued that criticism at its worth. It was unsparing and too manifestly unjust for me to attend to it.”

  Sylvia Wolf has put many remarkable photographs on view in her show, but I’m not sure she has done Cameron the feminist justice she believes she has. As in any all-woman or all-man gathering, a certain artificiality and self-consciousness adheres to the occasion. (A couple of costumed men appear—Henry Taylor as King Ahasuerus in one group picture and as Friar Laurence in another, and an anonymous sitter as Lancelot—but they are recessive, like the male escorts in women’s fashion pictures.) The famous-men portraits may have once been overvalued, but without them the world of Cameron’s photography is diminished. The beauty that Cameron found, and in a surprising number of cases was able to arrest, among the aging and aged men of the Victorian literary and art establishment is a cornerstone of her achievement. (Her refusal to photograph aging and aged women is an obvious measure of her understanding of biology’s misogyny.) According to Gernsheim, Cameron once took a visitor to a bedroom in her house where Charles had retreated and lay fast asleep. “Pointing to him, she said, ‘Behold the most beautiful old man on earth!’ When out of the room the stranger inquired, ‘Who is he, is he a model?’ to which Mrs. Cameron proudly replied: ‘He is my husband.’ ” The banishment of the beautiful old men—like the ban on the funny stories—is surely only a temporary obstruction standing in the way of the enlivening force of the Cameron revival.

  * October, vol. 76 (Spring 1996).

  * One of the exceptions was Julia Jackson, who had inherited the Pattle beauty and whom Cameron obsessively photographed—always as herself—in the years before and after her first marriage to Herbert Duckworth. Another was Cameron’s only daughter, Julia Norman—the daughter who gave her the camera—whom Cameron scarcely ever photographed. A rare portrait of Julia Norman at the age of twenty-eight, which appeared in Famous Men and Fair Women and appears in the Cameron’s Women show, renders her as a woman of a rather startlingly different type of beauty from that to which Cameron was habitually drawn. It shows a dark, strong-featured woman dressed in black, her sad, almost grim face framed by a dark veil; she is looking down, and she could be one of the nameless widows who appear in news photographs from war-torn Near Eastern or Mediterranean places. However, it was her husband who was to become a widower: she died in childbirth in 1873, at the age of thirty-four, leaving six children. None of Cameron’s biographers have enlarged on the relationship between mother and daughter, around which there hovers a certain atmosphere of unease.

  GOOD PICTURES

  2004

  1

  On January 7, 1971, Diane Arbus conducted interviews with prospective students of a photography master class she would teach that winter—the last winter of her life—and wrote about the interviewees thus:

  . . . one after another would parade into this empty room like as if I was a burlesque producer or a pimp . . . their pictures mostly bored me and I had a slight feeling like I didn’t know what was wrong with ’em, they werent after all so wildly different from Good pictures, except there was that mysterious thing . . . I didn’t want to look at them, as if it might be catching and I would end up learning from the students how to take just such boring pix as those.*

  If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition, Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. Her photographs relentlessly tell us how interesting they are; they dare us to look away from them. If our favorite thing in the world is not to look at pictures of freaks and transvestites and nudists and mentally retarded people, this cuts no ice with Arbus. She forces us to acknowledge that these are no ordinary unpleasant pictures of society’s discards. They are photographs only Diane Arbus could have taken. The question of whether they are also great works of photography remains undetermined thirty years after her death. Arbus is not universally beloved the way, say, Walker Evans is. Interestingly (and fittingly), she herself did not love Evans. Of the 1971 Evans retrospective at MoMA she wrote, “First I was totally whammied by it. Like THERE is a photographer, it was so endless and pristine. Then by the third time I saw it I realized how it really bores me. Can’t bear most of what he photographs.”*

  There are those who can’t bear most of what Arbus photographs. Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1984, the late Jonathan Lieberson complained that “her photographs call too much attention to her, one is too much reminded that her success as a photographer consists in her ‘figuring’ herself into a strange situation and too much invited to ask how she did it.” Comparing Arbus’s “cold, dead elegance” to the messy naturalism of Weegee, Lieberson concluded that “there is something life-denying, at any rate not quite human, about it that prevents it from being altogether first-rate.” More recently, Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic: “if directness is photography’s glory, it is also liable to be manipulated, used as a sort of all-purpose rhetorical device, until frankness itself becomes a form of obfuscation or artiness—which is a fair description, I think, of the work of Diane Arbus.” Perl went on to describe Arbus as “one of those devious bohemians who celebrate other people’s eccentricities and are all the while aggrandizing their own narcissistically pessimistic view of the world,” and to bitterly note that “the woman and her work are exerting as strong an attraction today as they did at the time of the posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.”

  The occasion for Lieberson’s calm disdain was the publication of Patricia Bosworth’s unauthorized biography of Arbus. Perl’s excited harshness was set off by the publication of a huge new book of Arbus’s photographs entitled Revelations that accompanies a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is generating a galling aura of success. Two excellent sympathetic essays on Arbus—one by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker and the other by Arthur Lubow in The New York Times Magazine—have buttressed the sense of a notable cultural event, as have ubiquitous shorter positive notices. The new book adds many new photographs to the Arbus oeuvre and offers an authorized version of Arbus’s life. It adds, as such publications are designed to do, great luster to the figure of Arbus; it makes a kind of institution of her. But it also, unwittingly and perhaps inevitably, blurs the radicalism of the achievement that has made her life an object of avid interest.

  The Bosworth biography, which was largely based on Bosworth’s interviews with self-promoting contemporaries—ungentlemanly men who couldn’t resist boasting of sleeping with Arbus and faithless women who couldn’t wait to betray Arbus’s confidences—was almost universally disliked. “A pall of smut hangs over the book,” Lieberson icily wrote, deploring the portrait of Arbus that emerges as “brooding and morbid and sexually perverse, slightly absurd as she runs about asking her friends if they know any ‘battered people’ or ‘freaks’ she can photograph.”

  Although Revelations never mentions Bosworth’s book, it contains an obvious corrective to it in the form of a biographical account, entitled “A Chronology,” written by Doon Arbus, Diane’s older daughter, and Elisabeth Sussman, one of the curators of the San Francisco show. Here, in the place of the base metal of unreliable, self-serving hearsay, we have the solid gold of letters and diary entries and compositions written by Arbus herself. These are quoted at length and accompanied by great numbers of photographs of family members and friends and Arbus herself. And guess what? Arbus comes out looking just as brooding and morbid and sexually perverse and absurd. Where Bosworth, for example, offered secondhand and sometimes thirdhand accounts of the sex orgies Arbus participated in and photographed, the “Chronology” actually shows a photograph of a naked Arbus lying across the lap of a half-dressed black man. Quotations from the letters to which Bosworth was denied access similarly corroborate the impression of waifish unwholesomeness that Bosworth’s book gives. “I need to be forlorn and anonymous in order to be truly happy,” Arbus writes to a friend i
n 1967; and, writing from London in 1970, “Nobody seems miserable, drunk, crippled, mad, or desperate. I finally found a few vulgar things in the suburbs, but nothing sordid yet.” In her afterword, Doon Arbus writes that the “Chronology” “amounts to a kind of autobiography.” But it amounts to no such thing. Autobiography is the art of choosing what you want the world to know about you. Arbus had no more say in what would be quoted from her letters and journals than she had in what her contemporaries would blab into a tape recorder.

  In a memoir of Arbus published in Ms. magazine in 1972, Doon recalls the wrestling matches in bed she had with her mother:

  She always beat me. Every time. And when I think of it now, I have the feeling she tricked me into losing. I was always worried about being too rough with her . . . and always, I think, a little embarrassed by her enthusiasm for the contest, so that I would start to laugh, laugh too hard to concentrate, and it would end with me pinned on my back and her smiling placidly down at me.