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Author's Note:
Fascinating to watch where people come down in response to my critique of the Arbus Untitled project, and what hysteria it seems to evoke. My experience with being subjected to vituperative public attack goes way back to 1963, when The Brooklyn Tablet, infamous official organ of the Catholic archdiocese of Brooklyn, took me to task in its classic red-baiting/anti-Semitic style because I'd had the temerity to publish a one-act play imagining the death of God. But I must now report achieving a new personal best: I've actually been hissed at by Janet Malcolm in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Malcolm, of course, is well-known in photography/art circles as a fawning acolyte of John Szarkowski, Arbus' first major sponsor, and notorious in journalism circles for championing her own inalienable right to invent quotations whenever it suits her narrative impulses, thereby giving the profession a bad name. So her endorsement of Arbus's intrusion into the privacy of others comes as no surprise. I'm at an age where I can be judged by my enemies, and I'm delighted to welcome this one to the fold. Waxing positively ecstatic over the Arbus book, Malcolm apparently felt the need to react in some way to my critique of the project, but has no real rebuttal -- so, typically, she sniped. The paragraph in question follows, as does my reply, which I sent as a Letter to the Editor of the NYRB. Needless to say, they refused to publish it; so much for their commitment to public debate. -- A. D. C.

Here's Malcolm's hissy fit:

". . . In a peculiarly angry and completely misguided review of Untitled in The New York Observer, A. D. Coleman condemned it for exploiting its subjects and for violating 'the rights of the mentally challenged.' Coleman wrathfully pointed out that these 'are pictures that no responsible administrator of such a facility would or could permit to be made today.' Fortunately, Arbus was able to take her pictures before the doors closed. If anything could serve the cause of the people who inhabit 'such a facility,' it would be Arbus's pictures; only someone with a heart of stone or a mind much softened by cant could fail to be moved by them. The retarded are the highest nobility of all in Arbus's hierarchy of the different. It is we, the normally endowed, who may not meet the mental challenge of following Arbus's difficult discourse on suffering and inequality."

From Janet Malcolm's review, "Aristocrats," New York Review of Books (Vol. XLIII, no. 2, February 1, 1996, pp. 7-8).

I sent the following response:

February 8, 1996

New York Review of Books

To the Editor:

I find myself in the statistically unusual position of having no grounds to complain that Janet Malcolm misquoted me in her review of the new Arbus book ("Aristocrats," NYRB, February 1): the two dozen words she cites, and even their order, are accurate. But those disconnected snippets can give the NYRB's readers absolutely no useful indication of the thrust of my own essay on the subject of that project, as published last October 2 in the New York Observer. For that I see no solution but to suggest that Malcolm's brief fragments, and her sneering dismissal of me and the issues I raised, can best be contextualized by locating my discussion in its full form, either via the Observer or on the Internet, where it's been posted for some time as part of my newsletter, C: The Speed of Light. The latter can be found at The B.Y.O. Cafe, http://plaza.interport.net/byocafe. A chat page for discussion of the concerns I voiced has been set up there as well.

Trying to summarize in this space what I elaborate at considerable length in that essay would be pointless, though it's not inappropriate here to state that I opened two major cans of worms in my text, one of which -- concerning the authenticity of these images as a component of Arbus's oeuvre -- Malcolm avoids entirely. I also want to point out that since I refused on the basis of several clearly articulated and extensively argued principles to discuss the photographs themselves and my responses to them, neither Malcolm nor anyone else can have any idea as to whether or not I "fail to be moved by them." Thus her insinuation that I am "someone with a heart of stone or a mind much softened by cant" has no demonstrable basis in the facts of my position on the publication of these images; it's merely an ad hominem attack, a poisoning of the well, the rhetorical tic of a weak debater with no real confidence in the substance of her own argument. Malcolm at her best.

/s/ A. D. Coleman
New York Observer

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This letter, which The New York Review of Books refused to publish, originally appeared in my online newsletter, "C: The Speed of Light." © Copyright 1996 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.