Images that capture the ‘divineness’ in us

I awoke early the morning after viewing the Diane Arbus exhibit. I could see a thin, almost vaporous, line of light on the horizon, but otherwise a mottled darkness lay over the land. The fullness of dawn was yet to come.

I’m not sure what ended my sleep at so new an hour, but when I awoke I was thinking about the retrospective I had seen at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the faces of the ordinary and the exotic that make up our world.

It was an exhibit of the work of Arbus, whose compelling and evocative black-and-white photographs are increasingly haunting the American psyche, reflecting images of who we are in a sometimes disturbing array of glimpses and portraits.

Her pictures reveal us. Although we may not be the Russian midgets she depicts or the carnival fire eater or the tattooed man or the Jewish giant, there is a universal quality in the people she observes through the camera’s lens. We’re the faces in the crowd that catch her eye. It’s the “divineness” in us that makes us one.

That’s a term Arbus used in a high school paper, quoted in “Diane Arbus: Revelations,” a collection of her letters and pictures: “That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life.... I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”

The glow of the divine emerges from almost all the work she compiled over a 30-year period. That she sought out the bizarre as well as the ordinary offers testimony to the all-embracing spirit of the divine, a life force that accepts and unites the midget and the giant with equal affection.

What drew me to the faces of her subjects is not only the strange beauty of the people she photographed but also the stories the photographs tell. I have worked around and with photographers all of my professional life and know that they seek that core of humanity that explains why they took the picture. They want the viewer to know what the image says.

I see that in an otherwise undistinguished Arbus photo of two women walking in New York’s Central Park. It is a raw autumn scene against a backdrop of leafless trees and somber sky. The women, both middle-aged, are dressed in dark finery, their shadows preceding them along the wide path, their expressions fixed and angry. We see them locked in the prison of their thoughts, en route to a destination that compels them as it repulses them. We see them walking to their destiny.

Arbus was born into a privileged family but spent a good part of her life denying it in the photographs she took. She began taking pictures in 1941, the year she was married, and continued through childbirths and divorce until her death in 1971. A coroner’s report, cleansed of her humanness, her divineness, noted: “Final cause of death incised wounds of wrists with external hemorrhage. Acute barbiturate poisoning. Suicidal.”

I wanted more than that, even though it was written 33 years ago. I wanted to know if what she saw in the faces and in the eyes of those she photographed made her decide to take the pills and slash her wrists. Was there something there, something terrible and haunting, that drove her into the darkness? Was the divineness too much for her to comprehend?

I know that psychiatrists offer explanations. I know about bipolar afflictions. An uncle who died in a mental institution saw things that others missed, shadows on the edge of life that flitted in and out of his consciousness. I was a child when I last saw him, but I remember looking for the things he talked about, staring where he stared, watching his energy explode and then whisper away. And I wondered.

Arbus, 48 when she took her life, possibly explained her own illness in a letter to a friend, published in “Revelations”: “I go up and down a lot ... I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things ... and quite suddenly either through tiredness or a disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes, leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very things I thought I was eager for!”

Artists sometimes pay a price for the sensitivities they possess, whether it’s the images in their heads that they translate into paintings or sculptures or the life they perceive through the eye of a camera. Diane Arbus saw iconic effigies in the ordinary and celebrated the anomalies of those who were not so ordinary, finding a unifying thread of divinity in both.

A large photograph in the exhibit at LACMA is a double exposure of a self-portrait of Arbus overlaid on a night scene of Manhattan, with its neon, its people and its rush of life. The photograph is described as an error, but I wonder. The face that floats through it, with large, glowing eyes staring beyond the emulsion, may be there to remind us, in a way, how wonderful we all are and how clearly she saw that.