Photo art: Diane Arbus; Tough & Tender

Everyone knows how hard it is to take a group photo. There’s always someone with eyes closed or pulling a funny face.

A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St, NYC(1966) by Diane Arbus.

Everyone knows how hard it is to take a group photograph that satisfies everyone in the picture. Even allowing for the demands of vanity, there always seems to be someone with their eyes closed, or looking away, or making a funny face. Beautiful faces can look ugly, serene ones anxious. Some people can be almost unrecognisable. For the same reason, the famous are at the mercy of photographers and editors. Gossip magazines revel in alternately glamorous and bedraggled pictures of starlets: if there are rumours of a relationship breakup, a shot of an actress slipping out to the shops without makeup readily evokes an imaginary distraught state.

It’s a nightmare for politicians too. We can see why they learn to keep beaming with confidence no matter what is happening, because if anything goes wrong, the editors will be scouring the files for a hangdog shot to use with a complementary headline. Teenagers, of course, know that they must always be beautiful and happy on social media.

The fact is photography can be very alienating in the way it takes a single instant out of the flow of time, out of the sequence of instants. This is not the same thing as the intuitive sense we may sometimes have of a wholeness beyond time; it is on the contrary a reductive focus on the fragmentary nature of succession.

Great portrait photographers, from Edward Steichen to Annie Leibovitz, work hard to find the best way to capture their subject: not simply to make them more beautiful or glamorous, but to convey a sense of their inner life. And this is not simply flattering them, because although superficial good looks are momentarily attractive, it is the inner life that we really like and admire and even love in people, and that life is capable of transfiguring features that are objectively unremarkable or even ugly.

Street photography is a different genre, or subgenre, of documentary photography in which the concern is more on the type than the individual and that is why, although photographers such as Diane Arbus always protest their affection and respect for their subjects, they are fundamentally more concerned to see them as representative of a social phenomenon or a culture than to enter into their inner life.

This tendency is aggravated by a positive attraction to ugliness, a significant theme in modernist culture, especially before, during and after World War II, when it could seem that any kind of beauty or glamour was an illusion masking the horrors of reality. And this what is clear in the work of a number of precursors included in this exhibition, including the Austrian-born Lisette Model, who ended up working in New York City and who became Arbus’s teacher.

Model specialised in looking for the grotesque, like the enormously obese woman she photographs at Coney Island (1939-41), hung next to a dessicated crone in San Francisco with a face distorted by a lifetime of lip-pursing (1949). Perhaps grimmest of all is the pair of terrible old harridans watching a fashion show at the Hotel Pierre in 1946.

No doubt the ugliness Model reveals is an aspect of reality, but there is something limited about this message; there is nothing to be gained by dwelling on these images, whereas the far more subtle pictures of her Weimar contemporaries August Sander or Marianne Breslauer, not included in this exhibition, seem inexhaustibly suggestive.

Walker Evans is cited as another influence, but in his case the ugliness is incidental, and it arises from the harshness and poverty of the lives of the share farmers who are his subjects. His pictures are restrained rather than overstated; the figures are posed and are treated with dignity and seriousness.

Arbus’s own oeuvre is striking, if not appealing. She claimed to love freaks, as she nonetheless called them, and perhaps there was nothing she could do to make them more three-dimensional than they were. The Muscle man displaying his physique in his miserable flat in 1962 is obviously someone who has allowed his life to be dominated by one futile obsession. The Burlesque comedienne (1963) is equally trapped in her tawdry existence, and the Young man in curlers at homeon West 20th St, NYC (1966) stares out at us with hollow eyes.

Two Ladies at the automat (1966) may make us pause. Were they really as grotesque as Arbus makes them look? Could they have been funny and charming if we had seen them in motion? Then again, the hats, the cigarettes and the postures — in the shabby environment of a bottom-of-the-barrel eatery — suggest a dislocation from reality that is slightly deranged.

But there is no doubt that she is a remarkable photographer, at her best in a picture like Boy with straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade (1967). Here again there is no question of getting inside the mind of the subject, but the image is completely dispassionate, the objective evidence is presented, and we are left mulling what to make of this clean-cut but weedy teenager who is about to demonstrate in favour of the Vietnam War. It is a far better photograph than the one next to it, also of a pro-war teenager but this time a goofy, pimply boy who appears to be a moron.

Several other photographers are included as contemporaries, or as influenced by Arbus. Here there is an interesting contrast between Milton Rogovin, who photographs poor families, mostly of mixed race, but always with their consent and with stillness and dignity, and Garry Winogrand, who preferred to snap people without their knowledge. Winogrand is represented by one remarkable and moving picture, American Legion Convention, Dallas, (1964), in which a legless amputee lies on the ground gazing pitifully towards us, encircled by Legionnaires who look up, down, away, anywhere but at the awful spectacle of suffering. On a much lighter note he has a striking picture of a girl wearing what would still be considered an outrageously revealing dress to a ball, and another picture that relates the sequel.

The concurrent exhibition a short walk away at the National Portrait Gallery touches on some similar material, although its premise, as suggested in the title Tough & Tender is to consider images of males at an age when they are coming to manhood but still vulnerable.

In spite of this, the first and one of the most striking images is of a young woman standing naked in the shower. It is discreetly framed at the bottom, but her raised arms and armpit hair stand in for what is not seen and remind us — in a generation with a neurotic dread of body hair — of a more spontaneous time. The direct gaze we encounter is primarily directed at the photographer, Nan Goldin, with whom Siobhan, a young British woman who also liked to dress as a man, was then having an affair.

Goldin’s other two pictures are from her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985-86), which chronicled the artist’s experience of the last phase of the sexual revolution, from the late 1970s until the eruption of AIDS in the early 80s. The famous picture of Nan and Brian in Bed (1983) was on the cover of the book. There is a palpable tension between the two lovers and the book includes a self-portrait from a couple of years later, after he had beaten her savagely.

Together with Goldin’s, Robert Mapple­thorpe’s pictures are the strongest in the exhibition. These include a photo of his lifelong friend Patti Smith (1976); a naked Phillip Prioleau in the attitude of a shot-putter (1979); and one of his famous pictures of the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyons, a shot that includes only one flexed arm and a single breast.

Among several young contemporary Australian photographers who all seem rather desultory chroniclers of an age with nothing like the edginess or passion of Goldin’s and Mapplethorpe’s, perhaps the most notable is Warwick Baker. His Marnie & Immi (2012) shows a young mother breastfeeding her baby, but with a confounded look in her eyes, as though she is wondering what is happening to her.

His Katja (2015), a young woman with shaven head and tattoos, evokes the predicament of a personality locked into self-imposed objectification. And conversely, the two pictures of Rowan — one in bra and panties and the other kneeling naked in the shower — are vulnerable and confused.

With Larry Clark we return to 70s America: not to the arty Bohemia of New York, however, but to a mixture of teenage sexual experimentation and glimpses of a criminal underclass of drug addicts. Clark is also known as a filmmaker whose best-known works include Kids (1995) and Ken Park (2002); the latter is banned in Australia.

His Teenager asleep (1976) shows a young boy wearing only a pair of jeans asleep on a bed, his face reflected in a mirror behind. There is nothing overtly erotic about this photograph, except that it raises the question of its circumstances; such questions are even more inescapable in the picture of a young Hispanic boy lying naked in a bath (1979).

There are two shots of young Hispanic men with babies, one standing (1972), the other lying on a bed and smoking (1963). They seem to represent individuals connected with an under­world of drugs and crime, as does another picture of a youth, taken presumably in the parental home: a claustrophobic interior with a kitsch painting of Christ framed on the wall and a bowl of plastic flowers in front of it.

The exhibition ends with a documentary of Chris Burden’s performance art, perhaps because some of his sillier actions, like attempting to breathe water, have an affinity with the confused risk-taking behaviour of immature youths. But the documentary seems out of place and is interminably long, and one turns back to one of the few pictures by Clark — or indeed by any of these photographers — that expresses an experience of vitality and joy: an engaging shot, bac-lit in the afternoon sun, of seven boys and four girls lined up at the beach before skinny-dipping: the most innocent pleasure of the 70s.

Diane Arbus

National Gallery of Australia. Until October 30.

Tough & Tender

National Portrait Gallery. Until October 16.