The Subject of an Arbus

“Diane Arbus’s Jewish Giant,” a new exhibit that opens this Friday at the Jewish Museum, explores the subject of one of Arbus’s most famous photographs, “A Jewish giant at home with his parents, in the Bronx, N.Y.,” from 1970. In the picture, which is awkward, funny, and touching, the giant of the title looms over his miniature-looking parents in their apartment, supporting himself with two canes. The exhibit is part of “Masterpieces & Curiosities,” a series of exhibits at the Jewish Museum dedicated to individual works from the museum’s permanent collection.

The Jewish giant was Eddie Carmel, a sideshow entertainer. Carmel was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 and immigrated to New York with his family a few years later. At the age of fifteen, he began to show signs of abnormal growth, the result of gigantism. Carmel grew to be well over seven feet tall, and he went on to have a career that capitalized on his height, performing at venues like Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, in Times Square, which Arbus first visited in 1959. He was thirty-four years old when Arbus took this photograph of him, more than ten years after they first met, and he died two years later.

Arbus, who was born in New York in 1923 and committed suicide in 1971, is considered by some to be a controversial artist, in large part because of her subjects. In an essay about Arbus in the magazine, in 2003, Judith Thurman wrote, “Even before her death, in 1971, Arbus was exalted as a genius and reviled as a predator who conned her subjects out of their dignity.” She continues, “Looking at Arbus’s work, one has that visceral shock of the forbidden. It’s creepy not because her subjects are handicapped, loony, hideous, bizarre, sad, or perverse (though most of them are) but because there is something fundamentally taboo about the way she bares their primitive substance without their seeming to know it.”

Arbus herself said, “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot…. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

The exhibit “Diane Arbus’s Jewish Giant” occupies a small room in the museum. Arbus’s portrait of Carmel hangs in a large glass vitrine in the center of the floor, surrounded by a variety of objects that contextualize the picture. There are family photographs of Carmel as a young boy; art works of mythic and historic giants; a photograph by the artist Lisette Model, Arbus’s teacher and mentor, of a hermaphrodite entertainer who worked at Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus with Carmel; ephemera from Carmel’s life and career; and a collection of toy giants, like the Incredible Hulk.

When I asked Daniel Palmer, the curator of the exhibit, about the picture of Carmel, he wrote, “Other photographs of him from this time period also call attention to the techniques that sideshow promoters and journalists used to make him appear even bigger than he was. However, all of this underlines the fact that Arbus’s photo does not show Carmel as an exultant colossus but, rather, as he struggles to stand upright. This is not because the ceiling of the room is too low but instead because by this point his condition had crippled him and he required two canes to walk. Arbus uses her frank approach to her subjects in a way that allowed her to cut through Carmel’s public persona…. She conveys deeper truths about his difference and, even more profoundly, about human existence and the immensely complicated dynamics of the social roles that we each inhabit.”

The exhibit is on view through August 3rd.

Above: Exhibition installation shot featuring “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents, in the Bronx, N.Y.” (1970), printed by Neil Selkirk. Exhibition gallery photo by David Heald.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly suggested that Eddie Carmel’s height was the result of acromegaly. Carmel did suffer from acromegaly, but he grew as tall as he did because of gigantism, a condition that is also caused by excess growth hormone.