A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.

Diane Arbus, of course, is famous for having killed herself at the age of 48 in 1971. Since then, this unknown photographer’s work has sky rocketed in fame and value. Proving that nothing so much enhances the value of your work as suicide.

Which is not the same as saying that her photography is either good – it is not – or genuine. Indeed, few photographers have produced more shamefully contrived work than Arbus, which qualifies her instantly for the Hall of Fakes.

Arbus was smart. She cottoned on to the fact that the photographic intelligentsia was buying It, It being her cruel, exploitative view of a world seemingly filled with monsters, freaks and the deformed. There’s not another photographer who so cruelly mocks his subjects, distorting them this way and that, ridiculing them at every turn, without the least indication that she had either a heart or a conscience. It’s as if one of those poor fools who photographs beggars on the street suddenly acquired a taste for the bedside manner of the IRS and proceeded to put it to work in the local mental institution with a camera as a weapon.

Her work, then, is the antithesis of class, of decorum, of decency.

But face it. The intelligentsia, the taste makers, goodness help us, believed the exact opposite of what her pictures represented. Where there was poor taste, they saw insight. Where there was cruelty, they saw sympathy. Where there was depravity, they saw honor. Or said they did. She got away with it, until her lack of conscience eventually caught up with her, culminating in a miserable ending of slashed wrists and a drug overdose.

The best example of her fakery is perhaps seen in the contact sheet of the seemingly crazy child holding the hand grenade. Robert Frank, you cannot help thinking, would have pounced on this subject as an example of American depravity. Anything to knock the country that is his adopted home. At least his picture would have had some class. But taking a look at Arbus’s contact sheets you see, to your amazement, that this is in fact a very ordinary little boy playing with a toy. It’s just that in this one accidental shot he is grimacing just so and the whole thing takes on a look of insanity. A sweet, ordinary child, rendered crazy for the ages by the lying, dishonest vision of a supreme fake.

Don’t believe me? Then let me quote her for you and you be the judge:

“Freaks was (sic) a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

You can find her garbage on the web as I’m damned if I’m reproducing it here.

May we not see her like again.