We are surrounded by photographic images. We take them on our phones, we follow them on Instagram. They coalesce into visual static that we see but tune out. Yet we also go to museums and galleries to look at photographs that, we are told, were made by artists and merit our attention.
What’s the difference? Quite simply, an artist’s photograph is an expression of an individual sensibility, not merely a record of a glimpsed reality. Because it is produced by the mechanical contraption of a camera and reproduced (more or less) mechanically in a darkroom, a photograph seems less personal than a painting or sculpture. Like any other art, however, its value rests on the vision of its maker.
Documentary photography might seem to be outside the realm of art photography. In fact, an artist can portray the external world and imprint the image with a characteristic personal stamp. The test case is the work of Walker Evans, who made every effort to achieve a cool objectivity in his work. He was so scrupulous in leaching out all traces of his personality that this negative trait became a hallmark.
Evans referred to himself not as a documentary photographer, but as a photographer in the “documentary style.” Depicting Depression-era America under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration and later the Farm Security Administration, he chose to keep his distance, favoring observation over interaction. A student of literature before he took up photography, he emulated T. S. Eliot (born, like Evans, in St. Louis) in masking his insecurities and passions beneath a detached style. He also hailed the dry manner of another Midwesterner, Ernest Hemingway, as a “great influence on my work.” Toward the end of his life, he told an interviewer, “I’m excited up to a point [then] I must enter with another part of myself with discipline and control…as a surgeon has to be detached from human pain.”
Aside from his temperamental aloofness, he had artistic reasons for maintaining a distance. He carefully calculated the angle, lighting, and framing of his subject to construct a truthful rendering that was removed and adamantine, like the man himself. In this, he resembled one of the photographers he most admired: Eugène Atget, who used a view camera in the early twentieth century to depict corners of Paris and sold the photographs to painters as research material. Evans first saw Atget’s work in the studio of Berenice Abbott, who while working as Man Ray’s assistant had discovered the French artist. Soon after they met, Atget died, and Abbott purchased as much of his archive as she could and transported the glass negatives to New York. In 1930, Evans bought four prints she made from his plates. A year later, in Hound and Horn, he wrote of Atget:
Apparently he was oblivious to everything but the necessity of photographing Paris and its environs; but just what vision he carried in him of the monument he was leaving is not clear. It is possible to read into his photographs so many things he may never have formulated to himself… His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not the “poetry of the street” or “the poetry of Paris,” but the projection of Atget’s person.
What he said of Atget could be said with equal truth of Evans himself.
He liked to photograph the same scene with different cameras and lenses and from varying vantage points. Sometimes he would crop them to zero in on particular details. (Unlike another great American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who printed the full negative and viewed that as a moral stance, Evans remarked, “I would cut any inches off my frames in order to get a better picture.”) Over time he learned to favor a long lens, which compresses and flattens perspective. To avoid distracting shadows that make a view seem provisional and not definitive, he sought to work in bright sunlight, preferably in spring and autumn—unless he wanted shadows, as he sometimes did, to accentuate the geometry of a building.
“I think I incorporated Flaubert’s method almost unconsciously, but anyway I used it in two ways: both his realism, or naturalism, and his objectivity of treatment,” he said in an interview in 1971, near the end of his life. “The non-appearance of author. The non-subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do.” He adapted his method to his particular purposes and disparaged the glorification of technique. Asked by a student what camera he’d used to take a particular picture, he shot back in irritation that no one would inquire of an author his choice of typewriter. To capture New York subway passengers in a posture of “naked repose” that would strip away social pretense and reveal who they really were, he developed a procedure of concealing his camera lens and shooting the people seated on the opposite side of the car with a standardized aperture opening, focal length, and exposure time. Those portraits sacrificed polish in the service of honesty. He did not mind the loss.
It is a tribute to the acuity of Evans’s eye and the generosity of his spirit that he promoted two photographers who, like him, operated in the “documentary style,” but in a manner that deviated sharply from his own approach. Robert Frank’s personality—sour and skeptical—rose pungently off his pictures. An immigrant from Switzerland, where his Jewish family had anxiously waited out the war, Frank eyed his adopted country with the sharp eye of disillusionment: the promised land had not lived up to its promise. Instead of insinuating his emotions into his photographs (or, like Evans, attempting to exclude them), Frank positioned his feelings front and center. He used a handheld Leica in available light and often printed his negatives in high contrast to make photographs that were grainy and dark. A viewer was not, as with Evans, getting a definitive documentation of the subject. It was a partial view, in both senses—incomplete and particular to Frank.
Yeats compared the writing of a poem to the application of cosmetics on a woman’s face. In both, the results took much time to achieve but must look effortless. The mystery of a photographer like Frank is that he achieved what he did effortlessly. He snapped his pictures in a fraction of a second, yet they are as beautifully composed as if he had toiled to get them just right. With a large-format camera, such as Evans used, setting up is laborious. With Frank’s handheld Leica, he could take pictures on the fly.
Although Evans recognized Frank’s genius—crucially recommending him for the grant that financed the younger man’s cross-country car trip and the book, The Americans, that came out of it—the two photographers took opposite approaches to photography. Frank put no value on the posture of objectivity. One of his greatest photographs is “Trolley—New Orleans.” A close look shows how the picture exposes the racial divisions in that city: the vertical dividers of the streetcar that separate the whites in the front from the Blacks in the rear; the similarities between the exhausted-looking Black passenger and Renaissance imagery of Christ suffering; and the effect left by two prominent hands, one of a white boy who grasps the window mullion with assurance, the other of the Black laborer whose fingers dangle loosely and make no connection. In his tours of the American South, Evans photographed a grand Louisiana plantation house and hard-pressed Alabama sharecroppers dispassionately. Frank, who stated that the only sympathetic people he found in the South were Black, had a blatantly subjective point of view.
When it was published in 1959, The Americans, which is now acclaimed as one of the greatest photography books, was assailed by American critics who were offended by Frank’s jaundiced take on his adopted country. They missed the point. It wasn’t just his view of America. That was Frank’s take on life. An early photo in Paris in 1950 is a romantic scene he staged, of a young man holding behind his back a rose that he is about to present to a woman. It could have been a picture by Robert Doisneau, except for the figure sharing the foreground with the ardent suitor: an old man taking pipe tobacco out of a pouch. We are reminded that this is but a moment in the arc of the youth’s life, which all too soon will descend into something quite unromantic.
Frank gave up still photography early, moving into filmmaking. He also created montages out of his pictures, sometimes adding scrawled messages. Explaining his defection from the art at which he excelled, he said, “I loved it, spent my talents on it, I was committed to it; but when respectability and success became part of it, then it was time to look for another mistress or wife.” Getting too comfortable made him very uncomfortable.
Frank once said that he had known two people in his life who lived every moment as an artist, and one was Diane Arbus. Like Frank, Arbus feared repeating herself. Unlike him, however, she kept reinventing herself without relinquishing her camera. She began as a fashion photographer in collaboration with her husband, Allan, but the artificiality of what she was doing repelled her. In 1956, after a decade of rising dissatisfaction, she quit. In the fifteen years she worked as a solo photographer before her death, she devised her own unique approach, a hybrid of street photography and fashion photography. Unlike most street photographers, she engaged with her subjects. Indeed, it was only through the response of other people that she herself felt real. The complex blend of sympathy and derision that Arbus bestowed on the people she photographed, which was not so different from the way she regarded herself, unsettles viewers of her photographs to this day. It is often said of Arbus that she found the freakishness in “normal” people and the ordinariness of freaks. That was indeed something she aimed for. But her ambivalence toward her subjects is what jangles our composure and helps explain why her photographs have lost none of their controversial force.
Evans was astonished by Arbus’s forthright encounters. Very late in life, when she was too depressed to interact with people, she turned to catching people unawares, as Evans typically did. (His portraits of Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs in Hale County, Alabama, are anomalous.) But during the height of her career, she would insinuate herself into the homes of all sorts of people, many of them unsavory. Evans’s wife, Isabelle Storey, recalled his reaction when he was first shown Arbus’s photos. “He saw the pictures were posed,” Storey told me. “He admired that very much—her courage. He saw some of the people were marginal, and he would have photographed them, too, but secretly.”
Although Arbus is usually discussed in terms of her emotional connections to her subjects, arguably her greatest gift was her probing intelligence. She managed to contain within a single image more information than it could normally hold. To portray the different sides or moods of an individual, she hit upon the strategy of photographing identical twins or triplets, each with a different affect. To illuminate the guises we adopt in our self-presentation, she homed in on what she called “the gap between intention and effect”: the discrepancy between the way we wish to be seen and how others regard us, “the flaw” that gives away the game. It is why she was so fascinated by cross-dressers: she exposed the hairline beneath the wig. Her pictures in Los Angeles of the Universal Studios lot depict false building facades with the sky peeking through the windows and fake rocks being transported to the set on carts. Wittiest of all are her pictures of murals in New York lobbies, where a seam or an electric outlet reveals that the lovely Italian cove is just wallpaper pretending to be what it is not.
In May 1971—two months before she died by her own hand—Arbus became the first photographer to appear in Artforum. What’s more, she was given the cover. The editor, Philip Leider, explained that he chose to publish her photos because “Diane’s work accomplished for photography what we demanded be accomplished, under the needs of Modernism, for all arts: it owed nothing to any other art. What it had to offer could only be provided by photography.” A year later, posthumously, she became the first photographer to be included in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This recognition extended beyond a single photographer. It signaled that photographers were finally accepted as artists.
Arthur Lubow is the author of the biographies Diane Arbus and Man Ray. He writes regularly about photography for the New York Times.
