There’s nothing quite like Paris in November to blast away the winter blues. So that’s exactly where we went last weekend. Ok, we know the saying about Paris in the springtime, but at this time of year the city is ablaze with colour. Trees appear to burn with reds, oranges and yellows, the sun throws golden light onto the buildings, and the sunsets (best seen from one of the bridges over the Seine that are adorned with love padlocks) are quite simply amazing. Enough gushing, but we think that Parisians have a pretty good reason to be snobish about their city.
Of course one of the main reasons for going, other than for a little weekend jolly, was to get us some Parisian culture. We were lucky enough to get our mitts on tickets to the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, which we rocked up to on an inordinately warm winter’s afternoon and smugly skipped the epic queue snaking through the trees.
Once inside, we were more than happy to form an orderly queue so we could soak up each individual photo. And this is exactly what you must do when you see a Diane Arbus exhibition, as every expression captured tells a story. There are around 200 black and white photos in the exhibition, snapped around Arbus’ stomping ground, New York. We spotted a few of our favourites, such as the boy holding a hand-grenade and pulling the most interesting facial expression, and the man with his hair in rollers smoking a cigarette.
Arbus had the uncanny knack of turning something rather mundane – an average photo of a teenage couple for example – into an extraordinary image. And as she developed her art she sought out more interesting subjects, so that much of the exhibition is filled with photos of carnival performers, nudists, transvestites, celebrities and what were called ‘freaks’ – there’s a whole series of photos of women with Down’s Syndrome smiling and laughing or playing up to the camera by doing cartwheels. She managed to capture raw human expressions and a wealth of different lives. We were aware of her impact on photography, but we hadn’t quite grasped just how brilliant she was until faced with a whole room of her work. She was first and foremost a photographer, but she was also an anthropologist that documented the human experience.
This is the type of exhibition that you can’t help but be enthralled by. Even if you’re not an art lover, and find the idea of walking around an gallery exhausting, the photos will keep you entertained. It’s totally worth hopping on the two and half hour train-ride, which if you think about it, is the same amount of time it takes to get to Manchester.
Diane Arbus is on until 5 February 2012. For more information [click here]
- Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966
Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967
Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963
Images courtesy of The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC.