Returning the Gaze: Enfreakment in Disability Photography
Aurora Berger
As presented at the 108th College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, 2020
For centuries the stories of disabled people were not our own to tell. We were silenced by politics and power dynamics beyond our control, and when we succeeded it was “in spite of” our disabilities. I am asking others to uphold the standards for disability representation that we as a society are pushing for among other minorities. It is time for us, disabled writers, artists, and storytellers, to take control of our own stories.
The role of photography in social understandings of disability is critical. Disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes:
As a culture, we are at once obsessed with and intensely conflicted about the disabled body. We fear, deify, disavow, avoid, abstract, revere, conceal, and reconstruct disability-perhaps because it is one of the most universal, fundamental of human experiences. After all, we will all become disabled if we live long enough. Nonetheless, in representing disability in modernity, we have made the familiar seem strange, the human seem inhuman, the pervasive seem exceptional. (2002, p. 57)
Medical Professionals learn from textbooks filled with photographs of medical “specimens”. X-rays and CT scans create radiographs; MRI’s create images through magnetic resonance. A patient’s file is filled with images of their body, taken as documentation of their physical abnormalities. These are the imaging basis of the medical model, positing that disability is the physical anomaly. These are the images that we grow up understanding to mean disability, even if we do not understand what disability truly means. We see x-rays on television, in books, and we learn that like an x-ray of a broken bone, any body that does not match the illustrations in our biology textbook is somehow broken. In his seminal book, Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers argues for the positive impact that art has had on the lives and perceptions of disabled people. But when confronted with the photograph he writes:
Medical photographs cast disability as reality, not art, because their disabled subjects are exhibited first and foremost as medical specimens—examples of natural history gone bad and preserved for the advancement of science. No person in a medical photograph is a picture of health—all of which is to say that medical photographs represent medical subjects: the sick, the disabled, the injured, the deformed, those supposedly in need of a cure. The explicit ideology behind medical photographs is to promote a healthy world in which medical photography will no longer be necessary or possible as a genre, for once medical science prevails, a golden age will be upon us, and medical subjects will be gone forever. (2010, p. 44-45)
When it comes to understanding the way that disabled bodies have been represented in photography, I believe that Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs are a visual representation of what we term the “social model” of disability. The social model locates disability within society, within built environments and social interactions. Within the social model there is a belief that without societal ableism there would be no disability. Each of these artists need to be interrogated separately, but they have the commonality of audience. In their own ways Arbus and Witkin pander to their viewers, playing into the societal expectations of disability and enfreakment. As Siebers notes, “the ability to represent a person as a medical oddity often relies on the technique of the photograph itself, on its ability to shift an appearance, create an association, or elicit a context that disqualifies the subject as inferior” (2010, 46).
Arbus’s work is perhaps best characterized through what David Hevey terms “enfreakment”:
She saw herself and her “freaks” as fellow travelers into a living oblivion, a social death. … the crucial thing is that she considered her projection to be more important than their reality. She “normalised” [sic] [her] subjects by specifically placing them in that great site of bourgeois culture and consumption, the home…The “shock” for the hundreds of thousands of non-disabled viewers was that these portraits revealed a hinter-land existing in spite of the segregationist non-disabled world view. (Hevey, 2013, 436)
Arbus’s now-infamous photograph, A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. (1970), is, at face value, exactly what it claims to be: a photograph of a white man in his twenties, towering over his parents in their decidedly middle-class suburban living room. The photograph is black and white film likely taken with a medium format camera judging from the square crop of the image. This choice of camera is extremely important, because with that roll of film she actually shot not one or two frames, but a whole contact sheet of images. Thus, the abject horror shown on the faces of the parents as they gaze up at their son the giant (henceforth to be known by his actual name, Eddie Carmel), was chosen to be in the photograph that Arbus eventually took public.
This is one of the elements that begins to shift Arbus from photojournalist to willing enabler. As Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, “Arbus was not interested in ethical journalism. She chose subjects that she could believe were found, just lying about, without any value attached to them” (1973, p. 42). There is also the important note of the title. “A Jewish giant…” Arbus has often been accused of the enfreakment of her subjects and in case there are doubts regarding this, Arbus was quoted as saying “You know how every mother has nightmares when she’s pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother’s face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, ‘Oh my God, no’” (Schultz, 2011, p. 95). Her motives may not have been exactly well meaning, but Arbus has gone down in history as one of the best-known artists to document forms of disability. And that is important because as able bodied artists, Arbus and Witkin made little to no attempt to hide their contempt for the “monsters” that they photographed. This creates a gross bias in what images of the disabled are then seen by the public.
However, when Arbus was making this work in the 1950’s and 1960’s, her work was radical—she was giving the legitimacy of the documentary photograph to disabled people who may have otherwise remained unseen. Her work need not be condemned, but I do believe that in modern discussions we need to examine how this work plays into conversations about representation. Witkin’s works beg similar questions – what do photographs of disabled people mean when the photographer is able-bodied and claims to be “immunized against seeing disability”? Although his work does claim to portray disabilities as grotesque, to provide a mirror for the perceptions of the able public, I cannot shake the exploitation and voyeurism that permeates his images.
There are many artists, historians, and curators who love Witkin’s work. Those who do dislike the work are usually turned off by his admitted predilection for purchasing “unclaimed” human body parts, but morbidity is, to me, the least of his problems. Witkin subscribes very heavily to what Sontag calls “photography as shock therapy” (2003, p. 14). One review of his work in the LA Times wrote “Witkin's photographs are like clinical reports of the state of the contemporary soul, which looks like a spiritual Auschwitz. Whatever pleasure they give is voyeuristic shock. They are a form of perverse entertainment and fall short of art” (McDonald, 1987, par. 11). It is no secret that I have no love for Witkin, but I still think that he is important. His work (to me) represents a specific but extremely common conception that disabled bodies exist to be fetishized. Whether or not Witkin truly believes that his work is moral and can make a positive impact is beyond the point. His images are voyeuristic, although he claims that “his behaviour [sic] towards the disabled is different to that of the majority of society, as he has become immunized to it” (Allan, 2009, p. 12). Again, we must remind ourselves that Witkin is able-bodied.
Witkin has an obsession with what he terms “outsiders”, that is, “subjects ranging from various societal outcasts such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, amputees, people with disabilities and deformities to rotting corpses and dismembered body parts” (Martinique). This is the crux, the favorable comparisons that he draws between the living disabled humans and the able bodied corpse, the collapsing of identity and lived experiences within the genders, sexes, abilities, and appearances of those who are “outside”. I think of the Hannah Arendt quote: “Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them” (Rancière, 2010, p. 64).
There are of course laws for the rights of disabled people, but they are relatively new and largely unenforced. In a less literal sense, disabled individuals are frequently ignored or passed over. To exploit their existence as Witkin does, relying on the voyeurism of the viewer, is to reify the concept of disability as a spectacle. In his response to Arentdt, philosopher Jacques Rancière notes that “the contention that there exists a situation and a status 'beyond oppression', beyond account in terms of conflict and repression, or law and violence, has a stake that we need to be aware of” (2010, p. 64). To make the claim that a marginalized group is “beyond oppression” is to discount all oppression that they do face.
Witkin has many admirers, including the fashion designer Alexander McQueen who has repeatedly modeled elements of his fashion shows from Witkin’s images. His 2001 runway collection ASYLUM featured a recreation of one of Witkin’s images, a woman wearing a mask and hooked up to breathing tubes. At the end of the show, the woman’s heartbeat flat lined. McQueen received no flack for this representation, perhaps due to the otherworldly and outright unsettling nature of the show itself, but for actual disabled people who do rely on medical machinery, this show has a subtle message: our death is but a part of the artistic process. Similarly, television shows like American Horror Story: Freak Show give us permission to stare at disabled people under the guise of so-called “monsters”. Even if the show is, as many have argued, showing the problematic stereotyping of disabled bodies, “It authorizes the notion that the body is a spectacle; its purpose is to be appraised, critiqued, visually consumed. More than that, Freak Show suggests that the disabled body is public property, useful only as a source of entertainment, or as a warning” (Arseniuk, 2015, para. 4).
Photography, and in particular photojournalism, has long been complicit in the enfreakment of disability. One particular historic case of this can be seen in the use of photography that enabled the rise of P. T. Barnum and the traveling side show:
Traveling freak show performers often used their acts to sell pitch cards, pseudo-academic photographs sold during the exhibition of their bodies. These cards are both stunning examples of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography and fascinating glimpses at ways in which sideshow performers were forced to play to primarily white audiences’ prejudices, fears, and repressed desires in order to part rubes from their money. (Alford, 2017, para. 4)
Although these cards’ sales did benefit the performers, the structuring of a system that requires the sale of these photographs is perhaps one of the simplest examples of the devaluing and overt commodification of the disabled body by those in power.
Even photojournalistic coverage of war and human disaster has added to this issue. When a photograph printed on the front page of the New York Times goes viral, the issue sells well, the article receives thousands of shares, the profit from that image comes from the commodification of the perceived grotesque: that is the disabled body being used as bait. The money rarely goes to the people whose pain was used to sell papers and clicks. These are tricky spaces to forge, the role of the observer and the exploitation of the body in pain. It is true that photojournalism has helped to bring public attention to human rights atrocities for over a century, but at what cost to the people that they have photographed?
This canon of disability art is only just beginning to form. It is time to elevate disabled voices, in particular those who are multiply marginalized. It is time for us as a community to learn from our mistakes.