Art

One day while walking in Central Park in New York in 1962, Diane Arbus happened upon a little boy playing in the park.  She asked if she could take pictures of the boy.  He agreed.  While she was preparing, the boy got impatient and posed angrily for the first shot.  But the succeeding shots were normal casual poses of the boy.  But that one photo of the collection became the more famous, defining photograph that would be used as a representative of Arbus work.   It became immortalized with the title Boy with Toy Hand Grenade.

As part of the progress of artistic photography into post-modernism and current styles, photographs no longer focus merely on joyous or contrived occasions.  They go along with the trends in literature and arts to portray the inner turmoil of human life.  Images along this line try to convey the brooding emotions and the internal conflict within a person.  In other words, photography has become more psychological.  And this is done by photographs that try to show more than what is seen by the eyes.  The photograph now invites the viewer to make another interpretation, and find out the real message behind the image.

Biography of Arbus 
Diane Arbus was born to the Jewish Nemerov family in 1923.  Her brother was United States Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov.  They were generally an affluent family.  She married at age 18 her childhood friend Allan Arbus.  They have two daughters.  The Arbuses separated in 1958 and divorced in 1969.  Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971.

Arbus was also known for black and white photos that focused on unusual people.  Her works included twins, giants, dwarfs, transvestites and sometimes ordinary people in unusual poses.  She was dubbed a photographer of freaks, an appellation she disliked.  However, most of her photographs show the subjects in a relaxed or easy manner.  Yet these photographs show some shocking or disturbing element that otherwise contradicts the attitude of the subjects.

Arbus intentionally sought out people on the fringes of society to reveal the abnormality that seethes within the curtain on seeming normality (Haber 2005).  It should also be noted that her photos were always in black and white, owing in part to color photography only starting to become more common.  While the picture has an archaic feel because of the black and white tones, it also tends to give a sense of eeriness and mystery.  Strangeness tends to look even stranger in black and while. But it also was perhaps of the choice of subjects, the angles and the actual final product that Arbus came out with in the end.

The Photo
The boy in the picture was Colin Wood, son of tennis player Sidney Wood.  Knowing about the photograph at age 14, he began to hate it.  But when he learned of the artistic value and fame of the photograph during his adulthood, he began to see it as a good conversation starter.  Wood sees the photo as a demonstration of the loneliness that everyone felt.  He also believes that this was the loneliness that Arbus herself felt.  The photo was displayed in many places posthumously after Arbus had died and her work was circulating many museums.  It now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arbus photo shows a boy standing and looking sullenly at the camera.  The left strap of his jumper is hanging down his shoulder.  His arms are long and thin, and they hang by his side with clawed hand.   His right hand is clenching a toy grenade.  His facial expression betrays annoyance, based on the story of how Arbus took the picture.  But it could also be interpreted as an angry expression.

Aside from the boy, there is the tree in the distance right behind him.  Also behind him is the profile of a woman, partially blocked by his head.  The woman is turned away from him.  To the right is another woman holding a childs hand, looking like they are walking towards the boy.  To the left is a pair of children, barely visible in the distance, and they are probably playing a game.  All the people in the background are distant and fuzzy.  Around them are the trees, clearly outlined and monstrously distinct.  They almost look like monsters coming out of the darkness.

The lighting of this picture is the brightest in the contact print. However, as the other photos show, that part of the park where Wood was photographed was dark, and Arbus used a flash to enhance the lighting.  The brightness, aside from illuminating the subject, created a contrast between the subject and the remaining background.  The ground beneath Wood was bright, and it emphasized barrenness.  The barren ground can symbolize the barren life of the boy, and explains his expression and reaction.

The background in the distance was out of focus, as expected in a photo that emphasized the foreground subject.  But that contrast was somewhat eerie, since it served to make the environment around the boy irrelevant and uninvolved  like ghosts.  They have nothing to do with boy, and they do not care about him.  The shadow of the trees, while beautiful, loom over him to emphasize more of the barrenness of the soil beneath.

Balance of Elements
Compared to all the other photos in the print, the Boy with Toy Hand Grenade photo stands out considerably, not just in the subject, but in many elements, including the background. All of the elements seen in the photo were interpreted as a symbol of loneliness within the ordinary world.  Of course, we know about Colin Woods annoyance with the delay in photographing that caused his expression as seen in the photo.  Yet this expression on the subject melded with the environment that complemented his expression.  His expression of anger combined with the barren and uncaring environment to convey a message that is not obvious upon first sight of the photo.  This was the message that ordinary people can be lonely, even during the seemingly happiest moments of life.

When seen in the context of the contact sheet, the Boy with Toy Hand Grenade photo can be considered an aberration within its group.  The rest of the prints shows Colin Wood being happier and posing eagerly for the camera.  There is a stark contrast between these photos and the single odd one.  Most of them show the boy nearer other objects noticed in the first photo, with less of the isolation and loneliness.  Some have even interpreted the photo as a representation of violence the seething violence coming out of the child is a complete opposite of the peaceful-looking surroundings.

The Boy with Toy Hand Grenade photo demonstrates how a picture can contain more than what is actually seen in the image.  In a sense, it can be a result of the interpretation of the viewer.  It can even be the opposite of what the picture shows visually.  Arbus photo also is perhaps one of the symbols of the growing existentialist and iconoclast movements of the time.  The 1960s was a time of turmoil, and more expressions of dissent and iconoclasm were coming out.  The photo perhaps captures the time when the childhood innocence of society was disappearing, and the harsh realities of adulthood were coming.