Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus’s photographs is not their subject
at all but the cumulative impression of the photographer’s consciousness: the
sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary.
Arbus was not a poet delving into her entrails to relate her own pain but a
photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that are painful.
And for pain sought rather than just felt, there may be a less than obvious
explanation. According to Reich, the masochist’s taste for pain does not spring
from a love of pain but from the hope of procuring, by means of pain, a strong
sensation; those handicapped by emotional or sensory analgesia only prefer pain
to not feeling anything at all. But there is another explanation of why people
seek pain, diametrically opposed to Reich’s, that also seems pertinent: that
they seek it not to feel more but to feel less.Insofar as looking at Arbus’s
photographs is, undeniably, an ordeal, they are typical of the kind of art
popular among sophisticated urban people right now: art that is a self-willed
test of hardness. Her photographs offer an occasion to demonstrate that life’s
horror can be faced without squeamishness. The photographer once had to say to
herself, Okay, I can accept that; the viewer is invited to make the same
declaration.
