The uncanny, the freakish, the beyond the limit (oh, and how limited it is!) of the "normal"--Arbus worked with and embodied all of these. Hence, she has become, among other things, not merely a rebel (hastily some have said a rebel without a cause), but a signifier of  a kind of "queer" existence. Or, rather, of existence as queer indeed. Sue-Ellen Case points out in a wonderful essay worth numerous readings that to the extent that "the queer" has been "historically constituted as the unnatural," it "breaks with a life/death binary that supposedly defines the 'natural' limits of Being" (see Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," differences,vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 1-20). We weren't expecting this visitation when we were experimenting with strobe, flash, fluorescent, and incandescent light. But here it is or so it seems to us ...
 

 

 
 

 
 

Copyright © 2000 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán,
SPIR: Conceptual Photography.
All Rights Reserved.

 

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