Diane Arbus, New York and I

ITALIAN VERSION

DI SERGIO MARIO ILLUMINATO

Queens – Central Park – Park Avenue Armory: DIANE ARBUS CONSTELLATION

I get off the bus after an hour of travel.
Queens behind me. Central Park just a few blocks away.
The journey is a sequence of faces and streets that don’t speak to each other: windows thrown open onto crumbling houses, darkened glass of buildings reflecting luxury.
Old men dragging carts to avoid falling.
Girls with fast food bags bigger than their heads.
Bodies swollen, bloated by sugar and intolerances.
Yet orderly. In line. Always. No one jumps ahead. No one pushes.
Rules like bones: hard, invisible, but holding everything together.

I think of Diane Arbus here, today.
I see her with the Rolleiflex slung over her shoulder, amidst this urban procession.
She would stop just inches from the face of a bent old man, waiting for a grimace to turn into a gaze.
I wonder if they would let her, or if she would be just another woman with a camera in a world already full of lenses.

Then I arrive.
The former armory is sober, almost anonymous. No one prepares you for what’s behind the door.
I step inside and find myself in an enormous hangar.
Over 400 photographs floating on iron and mirrors.
There is no silence. There’s a hum: shoes shifting, heads turning in unison.
A moment of hesitation.

Then I dive in.

Photos on every side.
Mirrors reflecting your face distorted by seeing too fast.
Twins staring at you. Children who look like tired adults. Adults who look like lost children.
Bodies that don’t ask to be understood, only to exist in front of you, forcing you to stay.

I walk slowly, breathe shallowly.
I’m not trying to understand. I decide to live.

I move among the images like inside a crowd that doesn’t move.
Each one is a zero-distance encounter.
No frame to protect, only the blade of a direct gaze.

I see the city outside poured in here: the woman dragging two grocery bags while one leg betrays her.
The boy with massive headphones chewing without chewing.
The couple sitting on the sidewalk, not speaking.
They are already here, fixed in black and white, decades before today.

Diane Arbus photographed what was there, but she was also a prophet.
These faces, these bodies, are the roots of what we now see on the streets.
Fragility is no longer an exception: it is the common condition.
Yet we continue to pretend it’s marginal.

I stop in front of a man in a suit and tie, sitting on a messy bed.
I don’t know if he’s a client, a husband, an actor.
I only know he doesn’t move, and his silence is stronger than any story.
I think of Levinas: the face of the other as a call to responsibility.
Here there is no room for distance.

The mirrors behind the photos are harsher than the images themselves.
They show you while you look, make you part of the scene.
You are no longer an observer. You are inside the same visual cage.
The question is no longer “Who are they?”
But “What do they see in me?”

Outside, in the present, we cling to polished versions of ourselves.
Filtered photos, curated narratives, tamed identities.
Everything the opposite of what Arbus confronts us with.
She does not sweeten. She does not embellish.
She takes reality and puts it front and center until it becomes impossible not to see.

I stay there, between a mirror and a photo.
My face next to that of an elderly woman with a hat too large.
She barely smiles. I don’t know if I’m smiling or gritting my teeth.
I realize the exhibition is a body-to-body with otherness.
But otherness is not the other: it’s me, when I stop protecting myself.

Trans women in floral clothes, pretending nothing. Upright. Proud. Eyes locked.
Circus performers halfway through makeup, between fiction and fatigue, in that gray zone where the show hasn’t started yet and maybe never will.
Children with adult faces: hard eyes, jutting chin, skin pulled tight as if life had already knocked and barged in without permission.

Every face is a hybrid.
Not just mixed ethnicities, but layered stories.
Skin that tells of migrations, crossings, broken and sewn-together legacies.
Diane Arbus didn’t photograph “diversity.” She photographed the world as it already was.
Before we learned to apply comforting labels.

Then the exit.
The light of Park Avenue hits like a blow.
Traffic flows precise. Yellow taxis. Pedestrians on crosswalks.
But I still see black and white over everything:
the woman waiting for the bus with a crooked wig, the Latino boy laughing alone,
a man with a trembling hand searching for keys.
It’s no longer New York: it’s an extension of the exhibition.

I walk toward the Guggenheim.
Every face already seems like a photo.
No longer anonymous: everyone has a story pressing to escape their skin.
I see a stylish couple whispering, a tourist snapping photos, a hospital bracelet still on a wrist.
A street vendor yawns between two customers, his face marked by sleepless nights.
I feel Arbus’s eye didn’t stay in the hangar. It’s here, inseparable.

Every person is a threshold, and I pass by as if brushing past open doors.
The Guggenheim is round, perfect. But stories don’t fit in geometries.
They are scattered. Unstable. Like the city itself.

Inside the Guggenheim the light is uniform, calibrated.
The works are spaced apart, protected by meters of space and air conditioning.
Silence of respect. But also of distance.
Everything is already mediated, explained, framed.
I walk the spiral, look at important works, but I feel something is missing.
Missing is risk.
Missing is the smell of warm breath, of eyes piercing you at two inches.
Missing is the physical necessity to stay or flee.

At the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with Diane Arbus, there were no instructions, no protection.
There was the urgency to look.
Here there is the certainty that everything can be contemplated without consequence.

I step out.
The difference is all there: at the Guggenheim you enter to see art.
At the Drill Hall you enter and art sees you first.
And never lets you go.

And then I think: if life were a photo, I would want to already be inside the shot before the viewer decides how to position me.

DIANE ARBUS CONSTELLATION
Curation Matthieu Humery
June 5 – August 17, 2025

 

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