In “Good Pictures,” an essay about Diane Arbus in Forty-One - TopicsExpress



          

In “Good Pictures,” an essay about Diane Arbus in Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm’s latest collection, we witness a wonderful outburst of Malcolmian irritation. The prompt is Revelations, a giant volume of Arbus’s photographs, published to coincide with a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Malcolm is appalled by the book. She believes it contains too many inferior photographs and too much text. Worst of all, she writes, it mingles text and photographs in such a way that there is no peaceful space in which to contemplate the photographs by themselves. Her indictment of the book’s bloated contents, lousy design, and sloppy editing continues at some length, before reaching its climax in a furious flight of metaphor: "The book reminds me of a porch I know with a lovely view of a valley, but where no one ever sits, because it is crammed from floor to ceiling with mattresses, broken chairs, TV sets, piles of dishes, cat carriers, baby strollers, farm implements, unfinished woodworking projects, cartons of back issues of Popular Mechanics, black plastic bags filled with who knows what."
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:57:00 +0000

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