Tag: Diane Arbus

What We’re Reading #5: Autumn 2025

From vaporwave-inflected exhibition-making to the recurring debates around Diane Arbus’ work, the latest instalment of What We’re Reading gathers texts that follow the circulation of style, ethics, politics, and power through curation, criticism and photography – exploring, by turns, where art is made palatable and where it speaks with urgency. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay considers how photographs from Gaza might resist their conscription into state propaganda, while Mariam Barghouti’s Eyes of Truth mourns the killing of Palestinian journalists, exposing an economy that prizes accolades over protecting media personnel.

Thomas King | Resource | 18 September 2025
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The Eyes of Truth | Mariam Barghouti for DAZED MENA, September 2025

“You see us only in trends of certain events, which would last for hours and then that’s it. We’re just numbers for the world, or non-existent.” So said photojournalist Mariam Riyad Abu Dagga, who was photographed and interviewed for DAZED MENA Issue 3. She was brutally killed just two weeks later by Israeli forces in a targeted strike on Nasser Hospital, along with four other journalists, Ahmed Abu Aziz, Hussam al-Masri, Mohammad Salama, and Moaz Abu Taha. Barghouti writes about Mariam’s wrenching decision to send her son Ghaith out of Gaza after their home was bombed, the loss of her mother soon after and Mariam’s own death.

As Israel’s campaign of slaughter continues, and a leaked White House plan reportedly calls for Gaza’s total displacement under U.S. trusteeship for a decade, Barghouti passionately denounces Western media that offers only belated awards, headlines and hollow sympathy, while never protecting or defending Palestinian media personnel: ‘Say their names, cite their work, defend their lives. Widen the record until it can be held. Allow Ghaith to inherit a world that finally learned to listen.’

Okwui Enwezor | Oluremi C. Onabanjo for 4Columns, September 2025

Duke University Press have published two volumes of selected writings from the larger-than-life figure, Okwui Enwezor, offering an invaluable resource for understanding his multifaceted contributions to contemporary art and curatorial practice. In her review on 4Columns, MoMA’s Oluremi C. Onabanjo casts a clear and discerning eye on the late writer’s intellectual and curatorial legacy; his essays and exhibitions (including his selection to curate the Documenta 11 in 2002) consistently challenging Western-centric art discourses, destabilising conventional notions of geography and periodisation, and foregrounding historically marginalised perspectives. While acknowledging Enwezor’s ‘lack of substantive engagement with Black feminist theorists’ and other contemporary critiques, Onabanjo emphasises a rare synthesis of literary sensibility, curatorial ambition and poetics that positions his varied contributions as foundational for future generations of artists, scholars and curators. These volumes, she writes, ‘demonstrate the continued utility of examining Enwezor’s positions – not only for what he engendered, but for what he provoked.’

A Massive Diane Arbus Exhibition Does So Little | Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic, June 2025

Hyperallergic’s coverage of the Diane Arbus: Constellation exhibition at New York’s Park Avenue Armory sparked a mixed chorus of responses in the publication’s Instagram comments, reflecting the contentious ethical debates still surrounding her work. In his review, Bishara immediately flags Arbus’ ‘freak photographs of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people,’ often ‘ambushed in asylums and hospitals,’ as caught in a classist gaze and exhibited without confronting this long-standing ethical fault line. He argues the show’s labyrinthine installation, lack of chronology or thematic grouping, and ban on visitor photography turn 455 images into an ahistorical maze, stripped of context, labels and narrative. Pushing back, there are those reminding that Arbus’ work arose from long and sustained collaborations with those she photographed, suggesting there is more at stake in Arbus and photography more broadly than a Sontagian critique allows – which Bishara, unlike other viewers of the show, doesn’t seem to see past. 

A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art with Orlando Whitfield | Extraordinary Creatives, August 2025

Less what we’re reading and more about what we’re listening to is Ceri Hand’s podcast Extraordinary Creatives. Her vast experience and sensitivity as a host invite guests to share candid reflections and engage in thoughtful conversations about contemporary creative practice. In an episode with Orlando Whitfield, author of All That Glitters, he recounts meeting and befriending Inigo Philbrick at Goldsmiths, University of London, charting the dealer’s meteoric rise and the scheme that became one of the most audacious scandals in art-market history. Through Philbrick’s path – from an internship at White Cube to a network of connections that carried him through various corners of the art world – Whitfield reflects on the possibilities of betrayal in friendship, the breakdowns that ripple through personal and professional relationships, and the bewildering mechanics of value within contemporary art. He also opens up about his own struggles, sharing the moments that drove him away from a field where, in his words, “most artworks have no intrinsic value whatsoever… emotion becomes economics.”

Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images | Ariella Aïsha Azoulay for Doubledummy, July 2025

Anonymous collective, NO-PHOTO, presented a site-specific activation during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, and to mark the occasion, a new edition of Doubledummy’s free newspaper was released, featuring Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images.

Azoulay, whom we also discussed in the previous What We’re Reading, following her interview with ArtReview, writes in this text (first published in Boston Review in 2023): ‘There is no such thing as an image of genocide. But images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of Israel’s battle of images.’ As urgent now as it was then, she goes on to say: ‘The images coming out of Gaza – at least when Israel hasn’t shut down the electricity and Internet – can only falsely be called images, since they capture the people who are calling to stop the genocide in rectangular immaterial forms. These are not discrete images of what has happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognise the decades-long genocide and to stop it now.’

The Rise of Vaporwave Curating | Rahel Aima for Frieze, July 2025

Writing to a malaise that haunts today’s global art exhibitions, Rahel Aima describes a drift toward a vaporwave-inflected curatorial style that cushions political crises in a haze of poetic vagueness and aestheticised melancholy. Its signature is a languid, lyrical framing, a ‘passive voice’ of curation favouring a soothing but hollow affect of community and care that anesthetises political urgency. I’m less convinced of this as a particular ‘style’, or mode, than as a symptom of spaces of suspension where power operates. The task, I think, is not simply to curate with greater ‘stakes,’ but to challenge the conditions that enforce palatability, that render ‘good feelings about bad situations’ comfortably consumable. Perhaps the pressing question, since it is all too true that there exists a ‘dangerous assumption that the art world is inherently progressive, even radical – and that a singular ‘art world’ exists at all,’ is where, and under what circumstances, curation might, if it can, escape these symptoms? ♦

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Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Images:

1-Cover of DAZED MENA Issue 3: Eyes of Truth

2-Covers of Okwui Enwezor Selected Writings, Volume 1. Toward a New African Art Discourse and Okwui Enwezor. Selected Writings, Volume 2. Curating the Postcolonial Condition, edited by Terry Smith, Duke University Press

3-Installation view of Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2023–24, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France © Adrian Deweerdt

4-Ceri Hand: Extraordinary Creatives

5-Cover of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images, Doubledummy

6-Screenshot of frieze.com

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Inventing Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier, the reclusive photographer who made her living as a nanny, has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want, argues Mark Durden in response to Anthology, the recent MK Gallery exhibition in Milton Keynes.

The story of Vivian Maier’s discovery and posthumous fame is fantastic. So much so that the trickster artist Joan Fontcuberta, in one of his recent public talks, mischievously said he had created her and asked an historian in Chicago to create the context for her work. He was joking of course.

The work of this reclusive photographer, who made her living as a nanny, came to light when the contents of a storage space she defaulted on was auctioned off in 2007, a couple of years before her death. She has subsequently become, as Fontcuberta suggests, a Mary Poppins figure whose Aladdin’s cave of photographic treasures feeds our desires and fantasies, which in the case of the exhibition Anthology, at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, seem to be centred upon the lost art of street photography.

The Chicago historian John Maloof was one of the buyers of Maier’s possessions and subsequently has been integral to the promotion and celebration of her photographic work – he now owns 90% of her output, over 140,000 images as well as 8mm film and audio recordings. It is from this collection this show is drawn – with over 140 photographs it makes quite a substantial exhibition, but at the same time represents a mere thousandth of the mass of photographs she left behind. With much of the exhibition given over to her black and white square format street pictures of New York and Chicago in the 1950s, she is being hyped as a new addition to an old school. Her black and white pictures are both new, in the sense they have not been seen before, and old in that they mark a past moment that we cannot really have again.

The show runs through the familiar array of street photography type subject matter – both observed and unobserved depictions of the carnival of different folk encountered in urban spaces. The picture of two elderly men crouched in contemplation over a coil of piping on a rainy sidewalk introduces the street photographer’s love of the surreal comedies of seemingly inexplicable witnessed events. The photograph of the still smoking remains of a burnt-out armchair on the sidewalk is of similar ilk, a beautiful mysterious incident. There is also the isolation of significant gestures and details, the tender touch of a couple holding hands, secretly observed from behind. The Rolleiflex camera held at waist height and into which she would look down into its viewfinder, was ideal for such surreptitious glimpses.

Maier can be astute in her picturing of the tensions and contradictions of conflict, as in the photograph entitled Armenian Woman Fighting (1956), which shows a stout older woman standing firm and defiant before a young police officer on the street in New York. The picture concentrates us on an intimacy despite their confrontation through the way his hands can be seen tightly gripping one of hers, as he tries to calm her. And there is a great image of disdain before wealth with a photograph of a woman, adorned and wrapped with two dead mink, the creature’s faces and claws all too visible and making a jarring contrast to her carefully refined self-image.  

Maier was not naïve. She was an avid film goer, both mainstream and avant-garde. A footnote in the recent Thames & Hudson monograph on Vivian Maier refers to how a house manager at a Chicago movie theatre said she even took an interest in Andy Warhol’s films. There is a certain Warholian aspect to her witty play with selfhood in her self-portraits, which are not revelatory but deadpan, blank and affectless. Perhaps one can also see her fascination for news stories and newspapers in relation to Warhol. Amongst the black-and-white street photographs, there is a remarkable and unusual close-up picture of the sides of two stacked newspapers – stuttering repetitions of photo images showing serious looking men in one stack, recurring Snoopy cartoon captions for laughter in the other: HA HA HA HA HA!. As one of her employers has recounted in Maloof’s documentary film about the photographer, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), she became an obsessive hoarder of copies of The New York Times, which she read daily and also photographed.

The opening wall text at the MK Gallery declares that this ‘self-taught artist’ now belongs to the canon of photographers alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand. This is all very well and good, but what really separates her work from those she is compared with, what makes it distinct? The self-portraits begin to signal a break from this street tradition as does her attention and fascination with newspapers, but the show does not make enough of her newspaper photographs and neither does it really emphasise enough the oddity of her self-portraits. The MK Gallery does however register the shift in her work as she started to use the Leica camera and colour film in the 1970s. Here one can find something different and less familiar. Her pictures and picturing are more layered and complex. In a photograph taken in an art museum, she plays upon the subtle interconnections between a smartly dressed woman and two girls and the painted portraits behind them. One child stands apart, rapt in attention, presumably captivated with the strange figure that Maier must have made as she took the picture. In an unusual self-portrait, her shadow and that of another figure is played off against and amongst different images on movie posters, with her shadow overlaying the image of an angel from the film Heaven Can Wait (1978), which is next to the image of an endangered female water skier on a Jaws 2 (1978) poster. And in a display of mirrors etched with the faces of stars, her hatted reflection appears over the face of Marilyn Monroe.

In a few colour photographs, the cropping and cutting of images provides her with a distinctive pictorial strategy. In the close-up of a newspaper, the rack’s Chicago Tribune sign cuts up the face of Nixon as we ponder the absurdity of his headline quote ‘Bombs saved lives’. In her picture of a suited African-American standing before her, she deliberately crops out his head, which draws attention to the way he is holding out a printed copy of The Last Messenger (1979), bearing a portrait of the face of the religious leader Elijah Mohammad.

With the last colour photograph included in the show, dated 1986, Maier has taken her ultimate self-portrait by photographing just her red hat and blue coat spread out on wooden decking. It seems a very knowing image. It beautifully suits what she has now become: a hollow figure to be taken up and reinvented again and again. Fontcuberta’s claim to have created her is then probably not that far from the truth. She is a fiction in that she has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want. The problem with the MK Gallery show is a question of how Maier’s work has been filtered. By delimiting her work to more familiar and populist street photography modes, we are in danger of losing all that is weird, rich and complex among the extraordinary mass of images she has left us. ♦

All images courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier: Anthology ran at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 11 June – 25 September 2022.

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Mark Durden is a writer, artist and academic. Together with David Campbell and Ian Brown, he works as part of the art group Common Culture. Since 2017, Durden has worked collaboratively with João Leal in photographing modernist European architecture, beginning with Álvaro Siza. He is currently Professor of Photography and Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, Cardiff.

Images:

1-Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

2-Vivian Maier, 18 September, 1962 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

3- Vivian Maier, New York, 3 September, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

4-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

5- Vivian Maier, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

6- Vivian Maier, New York, 27 July, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

7-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

8- Vivian Maier, New York, 2 December, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.