Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov was the brother of Diane Arbus, but is equally famous as a poet, a Poet Laureate of the USA and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Following the death by suicide of Diane he wrote:

To D-, Dead by Her Own Hand

^{My dear, I wonder if before the end}

^{You ever thought about a children’s game—}

^{I’m sure you must have played it too—in which}  

^{You ran along a narrow garden wall}  

^{Pretending it to be a mountain ledge}  

^{So steep a snowy darkness fell away}  

^{On either side to deeps invisible;}

^{And when you felt your balance being lost}

^{You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought}  

^{For only an instant: That was when I died.} 
 

^{That was a life ago. And now you’ve gone,}

^{Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game}  

^{Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark,}  

^{You go on running and you don’t look down,}  

^{Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.}

Seeing, Observing and Thinking – August Sander.

‘By means of seeing, observing and thinking, and with the aid of a camera and a date, we can capture world history and influence all humanity by means of the expressive potential of photography as a global language.’ August Sander, Photography as a Universal Language 1931.

August Sander (1876 – 1974) was a photographer who lived in Austria and Germany. His aim was to photograph series of ‘archetypes’ that described the Germanic people of his time. To that end he took thousands of portraits of people ranging from labourers, through tradesmen, artisans and professionals to the upper classes of society. These portraits were posed and often showed a background that would help to place the person in their work, such as a bricklayer carrying a hod or a pastry cook in the kitchen. He undertook a major project ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ with the aim of showing the individual as part of society and recording accurately the German people as a whole.

Sander also took many photographs of the countryside around his home, recording both natural beauty and the effects of human activity on the world. He took both distance pictures, such as ‘The Rhine near the Erpeler Ley rock (1930s)’ and details, for example, ‘Grapevine Snails (1930s)’.

A further series he undertook was of details of the human body such as hands.

It has been suggested that August Sander was the forerunner of many of the photographers of the later 20th Century such as Diane Arbus, and indeed he took a similar broad range of people including in his studies midgets, disabled people (blind) and circus performers. His portraits are, however, much more posed and formal and  less disturbing than hers.

On seeing a recent exhibition of his work I found that some of his portraits were very memorable such as ‘The Sage’ 1913 who was portrayed looking into space and dressed more like a wise countryman than a philosopher or an intellectual, and the ‘Red Cross Nurse, 1921’ who exuded an air of calm and placidity. There was also some interesting contrasts shown such as ‘The Soldier', 1940’ – newly uniformed and  confident as compared with ‘The Non-Commissioned Officer, 1944’ with a rumpled and worn uniform and a ‘1000 yard stare’ in his eyes.

                                                                                         The Soldier

Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

Reading the first chapters of The Photograph (Graham Clarke,1997) reminded me of seeing the Diane Arbus Exhibition at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh In May 2010. Seeing the photo of the twins immediately recalled the powerful impact of her photographs en masse. At the time I found the majority of them disturbing. This was not because of the types of people photographed as I work with disabled people on a daily basis, but because of the starkness of the images. This was overlaid with a consciousness that in the highly politically correct present time people would be very reluctant to take similar photographs because of a perceived lack of dignity. I suspect that these type of photographs were unusual then too  as when many of these were taken ‘asylums’ were part and parcel of everyday life, but also somewhere where disabled people were shut away from the general public awareness. In fact, many of the photographs of the learning disabled look as though they are delighting in being shot, this may be because of the level of intense interest Diane Arbus was showing them or simply because of a complete lack of self-consciousness.

“What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own” (Diane Arbus)

"There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness," (Diane Arbus)
Both photographs by Diane Arbus.