To Vima Newspaper
The secular side of the Christmas celebration has contributed to its establishment as the most popular in the Western world. Family warmth, home, solidarity, consumption, gifts, and children define its framework. However, in a society where all the above are shaken, it is natural for cracks to open through which all sorts of psychological crises, instabilities, and upheavals invade the festive framework. And if, despite the above, Christmas remains a tender childhood memory for most, this does not justify the agonizing effort to keep it intact over the years, within a framework of childhood innocence that has been lost. Is this an inability to accept a not-so-rosy reality? A denial of maturity? Or simply an escape through dreams?
There are very few photographs by American Diane Arbus that do not depict people. "Christmas Tree in the Living Room of Levittown on Long Island" is one of them. Yet people are present here even without being visible. The sad middle-class furniture, the nylon-covered lamp, the kitsch aesthetics, the huge and dominant Christmas tree, although suffocated by the ceiling, all constitute an image of people. They depict characters and suggest personalities. Those who momentarily left the room but seem to have left behind traces of the same emotions that pervade the human tapestry of Arbus's portraits: sadness, tenderness, compassion, sarcasm, and a hint of hidden despair. These are the people of the photographer. This is also what the disproportionate tree expresses, in a size that emphasizes the extent of hope and the depth of despair. Only Christmas can reveal all that is lost with the end of childhood innocence and hint at all that was not conquered afterwards. Yet, this is tragic and simultaneously human, therefore tender. Great artists, like Arbus, know that emotions are always contradictory and never unambiguous.
The well-known American photographer Diane Arbus first appeared in the late '60s on the occasion of an exhibition organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by the director of the Photography Department, John Szarkowski, to whom the world of photography owes much. Along with Arbus, the exhibition also featured newcomers Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, under the general title "New Documentary". The title implied the birth of a new type of faithful yet highly subjective documentation. Diane Arbus, who started her relationship with photography as a fashion photographer working with her husband Alan Arbus, also divorced both her husband and her professional occupation. Influenced by her photography teacher, the then-famous Lisette Model, she turned her interest to collecting faces she described as freaks, people of marginal appearance, who provoke laughter and sarcasm, but also tenderness, compassion, sadness, or despair. Emotions that are complementary and interchangeable. Arbus considered these people the aristocrats of life. Distinguished "by hand". She photographed them in a strict and repetitive form, in a square frame that contained very few elements of the surrounding space, while the focus was on the person itself. However, the photographer's particular value lies mainly in her detached (but never indifferent) attitude towards these individuals. The viewer of the photograph perceives the photographer's interest in the subject, but the photograph does not convey her feelings about him. Arbus thus expresses both a moral and aesthetic stance. She respects the person in front of the lens and does not simplify or decode his personality, nor does she impose or suggest a way of reading to the viewer. In doing so, she also respects the photograph itself, allowing the mystery of each capture to function through the viewer. Diane Arbus, a few years after her revealing first artistic appearance and at a still young age, left life by committing suicide. Her suicide perhaps indirectly gave her own interpretation of her photographs and a way to read them.
Plato Rivellis