A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx

By Ohad Ben Shimon, 2006

A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.1970, Diane Arbus, 1970

Diane Arbus to this day remains the mystery of the world of photography and perhaps the
one responsible for turning it into a well established, well recognized and highly effective
medium of art expression. By focusing on the subjective matter of reference within the
genre of portrait photography, instead of observing the world and nature in order to try to
copy it in the most authentic and natural way possible (like the old masters of
photography e.g. Ansel Adams), Arbus shifted the gaze inward granting us with a new
form of public self-reflection. In a way she changed what was until her time a ‘stare’ at
the world into a ‘gaze’ about the world. The former concentrated on the actual physical
‘seeing’ of the world. It meant to look and look again and to admire what we see with our
eyes until it is transformed into the level of a fetish. Arbus took this human peculiarity
and altered that ‘look’ into a gaze. She invites us to first glance at the world, then
recognize what we see, then come back to the image to explore it further, to then come
back to contemplating on that more and more. Through this method of seeing we might
find ourselves trapped in a loop of world-artist-viewer-world. First there is a world, then,
comes the artist who is fascinated by that world and attempts to copy it, to write it down.
Then the artist wants to show his fellow human beings what he has learnt from the world.
In turn, these fellow humans examine the world that the artist has presented to them and
are refreshed and somewhat reborn into the world, for in some way their perception of the
world has changed and so have they. In explaining her reasons for photographing, Arbus
states: “I really believed there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph
them.”
Arbus, together with August Sanders are the ones who, in a way, ‘created’ Rineke
Dijkstra. Arbus ‘explained’ to Dijkstra that it is alright to look within and to explore the
depths of one’s own personality in order to, at the end come up with one kind of truth,
one kind of reality. If we are not able to distinguish between different realities (‘But what
is the truth…?’ kind of dialectic) then at least lets try to tell one of them, the one we are
closest to and know best in the most close to truthful way. This has long been a tendency
in the philosophy and arts of the twentieth century.

In the famous image of A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.1970
Arbus portrays through her unique mixture of cruelness and tenderness the giant Eddie
Carmel with his aged parents. A possible socio-religious interpretation of the image-title
might take us back in time to the biblical story of David and Goliath the giant. In the case
of the biblical story however, the Jew, David, was the short, inferior ‘underdog’ and
Goliath the Philistine, was the superior, ‘the giant’. Before the battle Goliath yells to the
Jews, "Choose a man from among you to come fight me. If he can kill me the Philistines
will be your servants. If I kill him all of you will become servants of the Philistines."
David eventually wins the battle with Goliath in order to become the next king of the
Jewish people. In a fascinating twist of text-image relationship Arbus succeeds in
encompassing within this art work, the result of this famous biblical battle. The image of
A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.1970 reaffirms the outcomes of
that battle; The Philistines became the servants of the Jews, in fact; In Arbus’s metaphor
they have turned into Jews. Ironically, the biblical giant has turned from a Philistine giant
into a Jewish giant. The fact that ‘the old generation’ (the old parents in the image) are
Jewish as well erases the traces in time of the Philistine presence and in a sense rewrites
the past.