Throughout the nearly one dozen years of her mature work, “the couple” was a theme of ongoing interest for Arbus. Early on, the photographer recognized that when a photographic frame is placed around two individuals, a certain relationship is immediately created. The current exhibition will include two photographs dating as early as 1962: “The Junior Interstate Ballroom Dance Champions, Yonkers,” and “Man and boy on a bench in Central Park.” Though these are two very different pairs, they serve to illuminate the range of Arbus’s interest in this theme.

The subject of relationships preoccupied Arbus into her final years, as can be seen in the three “Untitled” photographs made in a home for Down Syndrome patients in Vineland, New Jersey. The exhibition will include several images that have not been published or exhibited heretofore.

Diane Arbus was a singular and explosive force in photography, reshaping both the ways pictures are made and our response to them. John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has written:

“Arbus knew that honesty is not a gift, endowed by a native naiveté, nor a matter of style, or politics, or philosophy. She knew rather that it is a reward bestowed for bravery in the face of the truth. … Arbus did not avert her eyes. She stuck with her subject exploring their secrets (and thus her own) more and more deeply. She was surely aware of the danger of this path, but she believed that her bravery would be equal to the demands she made of it.”

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Witkin’s subjects are from the darker side of the real world.  Freaks, transexuals, dwarfs, fetuses, cadavers and laboratory animals form the basis of Witkin’s work.  The work in this exhibition has been completed in the past two years, since his travelling exhibition of forty photographs appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1985.  His recent work has a more direct connection with individual circumstance and what Witkin refers to as “conditions of being.”

In addition to Witkin’s atypical subject matter, he also processes his prints untraditionally.  Scratching and drawing on the negatives, Witkin then prints through a tissue, selectively toning and bleaching the final prints, thus producing seductive images of heightened “object quality.”  This veling of the image and layering of historical and religious themes, lures the viewer into the picture, only to be abruptly drawn back into reality of the present and of the real-photographic image.

Witkin’s work raises questions and comments upon many issues of contemporary culture, while at the same time challenging our ideas about the nature of the photographic medium itself.

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Mapplethorpe’s work has always exploited the beauty of the black and white print.  His recent attention to the platinum printing process has extended this interest.  Because of the uniquely wide tonal range that can be achieved through the platinum process, this method is particularly well suited to the photographer’s keen sensitivity to tonal values.  Reinterpreting the tradition of platinum prints, Mapplethorpe has developed a unique printing technique of platinum emulsion on Belgian linen.  In his recent works, the completed prints are often paired with various colored fabric panels and frames which he himself designs.

Also included in the exhibition are three floral still-lifes created by a special photogravure process in which the image is transferred to silk fabric which is then mounted on paper.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are internationally recognized and widely published.  His most recent books include Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits (Twelvetrees Press) and Black Book (St. Martin’s Press).

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Considered one of the most significant and influential photographers working in color, Misrach in his recent work evidences an extraordinary sensitivity to light and its atmospheric effects on the land.  His use of the cumbersome 8”x10” view camera fills the photographs with dense and rewarding detail.  Misrach is the recipient of three NEA grants, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Ferguson Award.

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To quote from the catalog’s introduction:

Close Gallery

The exhibition included rarely seen works by Fox Talbot, Adolphe Braun, Carleton Watkins, Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others.

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Throughout her career, Diane Arbus was intrigued by anomaly and eccentricity, by groups involved in what she referred to as “the considerable ceremonies of our present.” These photographs, made at a home for retarded adults in Vineland, New Jersey are a synthesis and culmination of her fifteen years as a photographer. In her late work one feels an intense and deep pathos. It is about human limits, about fundamental questions of identity and truth, self and other, of meaning and purpose. Of some of her earliest, personal work, pictures which from the beginning examined the nature of those human mechanisms of personal identity, Arbus wrote:

There is a certain darkness to most of Arbus’ work, but nowhere is this more apparent than in her last pictures. Issues of what is conventional or not were completely dismissed, and in choosing individuals living at one of the extreme edges of the rational as her theme, Arbus transcended the particular for a far more universal inquiry into human nature. In these pictures of retarded people out-of-doors and under gray skies, the controlled order of the pictures, its careful pictorial balance, and the sense of confronting the subjects is totally gone. A bizarre choreography of address seems to be taking place before the artist’s camera, a hieroglyphics of communication that we cannot begin to understand. But while strange, there is also a warmth to the scene, and a simplicity of affectless behavior that impresses by its essential humanity. The pathos revealed is certainly not theirs; it is, if anything, ours.

As the critic Peter Bunnell has written, “Arbus’s pictures are very difficult to stay out of. In fact, it seems to me, that what disturbs people more than the subject of these pictures, is the intensity of their power to dominate us, to literally stop us in mid-life and demand we ask ourselves who we are.”

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