The Fourth Wall

[IMG:L]Photographs by
Amy Arbus
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In the past, I haven't considered photography an art because too much of it is the work of a contraption: the camera. Whoever owns one and takes a plethora of pictures of the same subject can declare himself an artist. Recall how many pictures a famed photographer snaps to end up with a portrait: more clicks than clucks from an angry hen. Has anyone after that many shots not come up with a single good one?

Well now, isn't film, an indisputable art, likewise made with a camera? True, but there is also the script, the director, the cast—not to mention sets, lighting, costumes, makeup and quite a bit of whatnot. What then is photography? A highly estimable thing: a craft. Anyone with back issues of a picture magazine, a pair of scissors, and a pot of glue can proclaim himself a collagist, i.e., artist. But how many people can call themselves craftsmen? Who can be sure that a daub is not an abstract painting? But no one can pass off what isn't a chair as a chair.

So when I call Amy Arbus, the photographer whose theatrical portraits have just come out in a book titled The Fourth Wall, a remarkable craftsman, this is far from derogatory. I myself would like to call the critic an artist, but would gladly settle for his being recognized as a craftsman.

Amy, daughter of the renowned Diane Arbus, may bring less controversy to her work, but surely no less skill. This is apparent already in the cover photograph. (There is no dust jacket, presumably on the justifiable assumption that the book, what with steady handling, will gather no more dust than a rolling stone would moss.)

That cover picture shows Alan Cumming as the louche emcee of Cabaret in his dressing room. He is in only pajama bottoms, has a cigarette dangling from his left arm, the right hand holding a bottle to his drinking mouth—two conceivable vices. He is wearing eye makeup, his hair slightly, artfully mussed. From the picture's left edge, a male hand intrudes, toasting Alan with a lofted paper cup, while a full wine glass paradoxically languishes on the edge of a sink. The shelf above the sink (or wash basin?) is lined with bathroom stuff; a higher shelf features bottles and a cocktail glass.

The cot to his left is covered with a faux leopard skin, and we know from the movies what sort of goings-on leopard skins encourage. On the wall are snapshots of someone wearing what seems to be the tops of the ab[IMG:R]ovementioned pajamas. The way the camera centers Cumming, but surrounds him with all this, including some toy guppies fishily hanging from a wire above him, tells us all that we need to know.

Here the clutter speaks; but Arbus can do like wonders with its opposite, frugal spareness. From The Boy from Oz, we do not get the lead, Hugh Jackman, as Peter Allen; rather, there is Isabel Keating, spookily channeling Judy Garland.

She wears a darkly elegant William Ivey Long outfit in stark contrast to a white brick background. From the stand-up collar, her head emerges as if on a platter after a decapitation. The face, under a discreetly tousled Paul Huntley wig, looks drawn and pleading, telltale rings shadowing the eyes. The partly extended right arm ends in a curved hand, expostulating if not actually begging. The left hand, though lowered, is similarly cupped, eager to be filled. The white brick wall behind Judy diminishes backward as into a fading past. Forward, it grows overwhelming, as if into an endless, empty future.

The Fourth Wall contains a brief, mostly self-serving, foreword by John Patrick Shanley, and a longer afterword by Arbus, chronicling the evolution of her technique. Both pieces mythologize the actor. Arbus provides also, on facing pages, capsule synopses of the shows from which the pictures, more tellingly, stem. There are usually also quotations from the actors themselves, not always notably pertinent.

Yet all that is relatively unimportant: These pictures do indeed speak louder than a thousand words. If a minor demurrer is called for, it is the portraitist's slight predilection, no doubt inherited from her mother, for the disturbing. So it is that, from Svejk, we get only a supporting actor, palpably uncomfortable on crutches; or that on two consecutive pictures from separate shows, Samantha Soule looks at us with equal discomfiture.

Worst of all, Howard Brenton's wretched Sore Throats, which I would happily forget, is memorialized by two creepy pictures. In the second, Laila Robins, one of our loveliest actresses, is prostrate and shrieking in pain as the villain's boot grinds her head into a rough cement ledge.

But such blemishes can be forgiven in a book that etches so many fine performances into our grateful memory. If someone now insisted that photography is, too, an art, I would not give him any grief. At the utmost a sigh.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.