Photographer Amy Arbus: Stranger than fiction
James Hossack

NEW YORK—The image is hard to ignore: a distracted dwarf wedged awkwardly between the legs of a Moulin Rouge dancer. The pose could be from a Belle Epoque painting, but the photograph is strangely difficult to pin down. The subjects are in 19th-century dress, but are obviously in front of a 20th-century building.
Perhaps the metal grating gives the setting away: a sidewalk in New York. The image is from the latest book by Amy Arbus, the daughter of celebrated late photographer Diane Arbus, who has spent years photographing actors in New York’s theatre district — with some deeply intriguing results.
“The Fourth Wall” explores what Arbus describes as the “bizarre disconnect” of actors, many in period costume, being photographed in modern settings — often just outside Broadway theatres between matinee and evening shows. Among the actors featured in the book and in a photography exhibition currently on at New York’s Lincoln Centre, are such familiar faces as John Malkovich, Liev Schreiber, Matthew Broderick and Ed Harris.
“I love the idea of the imaginary place where fiction and reality collide,” Arbus said in a recent interview. The book’s title, she explains, comes from the term for the imaginary wall between stage and theatre that audiences ignore as part of their willing suspension of disbelief.
“I’m playing with the idea of the fictional character and the real person of the actor seeping through,” says Arbus. “Most of them I was trying to blur the lines between whether that actor was actually that character or themselves.” She loves movie stars as much as the next person, Arbus explains, “but it really wasn’t about movie stars at all. It was who was doing the best job of convincing me that they were someone else and also that the character in some way was believable.
“I’m interested in the character more than the actor themselves,” Arbus insists. Focusing on their roles, she adds, allows actors to feel comfortable in front of the camera while not necessarily looking their best. “They don’t have quite the same self-consciousness as they would if they were having a picture taken as the actor that they truly are.” — ‘People would say you’re not as good as your mother’—
She says the photographs are more sophisticated than her earlier work, in which Arbus would capture New York street life with a 35mm camera, and were instead taken with a medium-format camera requiring much more preparation. “I love the idea that they often look like I could have just run into them,” she says, while confiding “it’s an enormous production to make these things happen. They are made often to look impromptu but there’s a lot of arranging.” Part of the allure of Arbus’s latest work is the disconcerting sense of shifting time that arises from contrasting characters and settings.
“Period clothes are my favourite because there’s an inherent time travel in my work anyway and the period clothes just enhance that,” Arbus explains. “You wouldn’t know the time or the place.”