The hardest thing for Diane was trying to overcome her shyness, the nauseating feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever she had to ask someone to pose. She’d stop a man or woman who intrigued her by exclaiming, “Oh, you look terrific! I’d like to photograph you,” and the person would hem and haw and ultimately consent because Diane seemed gentle and unthreatening. “I was terrified most of the time,” she said. But terror aroused her and made her feel; shattered her listlessness, her depression. Conquering her fears helped her develop the courage she felt her mother had failed to teach her.
She believed that picture-taking is a profound experience because it involves the risk of seeing ourselves as others see us. She had been around cameras long enough to know that what people want is an image of themselves that is acceptable to themselves. “The very process of posing requires a person to step out of himself as if he were an object,” she told Barbara Brown, another photographer. “He is no longer a self but he is still trying to look like the self he imagines himself to be…it’s impossible to get out of your skin and into somebody else’s, and that’s what photography is all about.”
After a while she realized that people paid attention to her when she had a camera in her hand; treated her with respect and kept their distance—gave her space. Eventually she wore a camera at all times. “I never take it off,” she said.
As she struggled to articulate her sense of style and content and her vision of everybody’s terrifying isolation and aloneness, she worked slowly and carefully, collaborating with her subjects. She began by photographing people at a distance, in the context of their environment; much later she shifted to close-up. “She learned from Model that in the isolation of the human figure one can mirror the essential aspects of society,” critic Peter Bunnell writes.
Model taught her not to obscure the image. As time went on, Diane’s subject matter became specific: “The androgynous, the crippled, the deformed, the dead, the dying, she never looked away, which took courage and independence,” Model said.
In the late fifties Diane was working with a 35-mm. camera, so most of her early pictures were marked by an abrupt framing and graininess. “In the beginning,” she said later, “I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all those little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots. Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you were dealing mostly in dark and light, not so much flesh and blood.” She would come back from a day of shooting and dump off her rolls of film in the darkroom with the Arbuses’ new assistant, Richard Marx. Marx developed and printed dozens of Diane’s earliest contact sheets: shadowy portraits of little girls—Amy included—enraptured by magic tricks performed in Cheech’s apartment. A deserted, eerie Central Park at dusk. Shadowy studies of a teen-age retarded boy holding a candle and staring into its flame, hypnotized. Diane would show the contacts and later the enlargements to both Allan and Lisette Model. “There was a tremendous fantasy quality even to her early work,” Model said. “There was an immediacy and directness which was positive and objective, but her fantasy feeling about people was subjective.”
One day Diane asked if Model could direct her to prisoners who were condemned to die. Another day she asked her teacher, “Do you know any streetwalkers?” And Model replied, “Darling, those women work for a living, too; leave them alone.”
Over the months a deep attachment developed between Diane and Lisette Model. “I’ve found my teacher!” Diane told Cheech excitedly. And Bob Meservey notes: “Diane stopped being such a little mouse after she studied with Model—she got more confidence.”
Alex Eliot believes that Model was more than a teacher. “She was a mentor, a guru. She accepted Diane as she was, without judgment. All great masters are like that. They look at you and know you are searching.”
At that point Diane was photographing only when she could fit it into her schedule. The Arbus maid had quit, so she was taking care of her daughters and the apartment fulltime.
Occasionally on a free afternoon she would drop by Model’s apartment—the one on Grove Street, and later the tiny basement off Sheridan Square. She loved the latter apartment because it was painted entirely black; she was surrounded by black walls, very little furniture, and no décor save for a few of Evsa’s paintings. A faucet dripped in the background. And she and Model could be entirely alone in their own universe without any visual interference, and they could talk and talk until night fell.
The two women had a lot in common. Both had grown up alternately spoiled and neglected, and surrounded by luxuries. Being born rich had given them a subconscious edge, even though they were now struggling artists, Model with her chipped red nail polish, Diane in her wrinkled shirtwaist dress. They both behaved like aristocrats.
And they would gossip and argue the hours away, exchanging secrets, theories, philosophy. Model believed herself to be psychic, clairvoyant—so sensitive that she would lock her photographs up each night so their souls wouldn’t get at her.
“An extraordinary love” developed between them, “an enormous friendship.” Model was drawn to Diane’s tenderness, her fragile quality. “I think she found me powerful and real. And the respect she had for me! Whatever happened to me, I knew Diane would be there. She had my love as few people had.”
Years later Diane told Newsweek: “Until I studied with Lisette I’d gone on dreaming photography rather than doing it. Lisette told me to enjoy myself when I was photographing and I began to, and then I learned from the work. Lisette taught me that I’d felt guilty about being a woman. Guilty because I didn’t think I could ever understand the mechanics of the camera. I’d always believed that since painters rendered every line on a canvas, they experience the image more completely than a photographer. That had bothered me. Lisette talked to me about how ancient the camera was and how the light stains the silver coating of the film silver so memory stains it too.” She told Diane she could experience any scene she photographed as fully as a painter painting it. “And Lisette shook up my puritan hang-ups.” Photographs that demand admiration have a power to disturb, she said. The best photographs are often subversive, unreasonable, delirious.
* The Limelight coffeehouse/gallery opened in 1954, the brainchild of Helen Gee, and it was the first gallery anywhere in America devoted exclusively to showing photographs. White walls and unaffected lighting were hallmarks of the Limelight, as were the excellent coffee and pastries served until one a.m. The record of exhibitions during its seven years was, according to Peter Bunnell, “a virtual international report on the state of the [photographer’s] art ten years after the war.” Shows included such names as Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, the Westons, Bert Stern, Louis Faurer, Elliott Erwitt, Jerome Liebling, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Cartier-Bresson. A good sale was $25 a picture. The Limelight was forced to close in 1961.
* Diane Arbus was not the first photographer to photograph “the forbidden” or “evil subject matter.”
In the 1880s American amateur photographers photographed their dead babies and Bellocq took portraits in a New Orleans whorehouse. During the 1920s Brassai descended into the Paris after-hours cafes and brothels and photographed whores douching after sex.
Weegee’s special target in the 1940s according to Weegee expert John Coplans was “people convulsed with pain or terror…people in extreme situations,” which Weegee documented for the New York Daily News. He recorded “appalling bloody scenes,” scenes full of gore and violence, and his work is “pitiless”; “there’s a demonic edge” to it, an almost cruel humor. He “invaded people’s lives” with his camera (later Diane was accused of that), and he could focus on a “lurid moment and get personal satisfaction from it.”
Diane revered Weegee, but she herself often vacillated between intimacy and distance, between identifying with and being alienated from her subjects. (Thus, her pictures of hookers and their clients taken in the 1960s and never published are said to be more res
tricted and harder to look at than Weegee—because they’re just the subject and Arbus reflected in the image. When you look at her pictures, you see not only the relaxed self-image produced by the sitter but often the astonishment, terror, and fascination of Diane herself.)
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BY 1958 DIANE AND Allan had moved again—this time to a triplex in Averell Harriman’s townhouse on East 68th Street. Their studio had once been the grand ballroom and was replete with marble floor and ornate fireplaces. Downstairs were the living quarters, including a kitchen and a little garden where the family could eat during the summer. As with all their places, the new Arbus home was sparsely furnished.
Their daughters were growing. Amy was a plump little thing; Doon—quiet, withdrawn—was breathtakingly beautiful and, Jane Eliot says, wonderfully protective toward her little sister. Every morning Diane accompanied Doon to Fifth Avenue and 68th Street, where she caught the bus to the Rudolf Steiner school.
Doon’s classmate Jill Isles recalls, “Diane always wore her camera around her neck, rain or shine. She looked bedraggled, but she was cheerful and every day she’d ask me politely, ‘And how are you?’ and she’d keep us both company until the bus came.”
In the afternoon Diane often took Amy to the park, roaming with her across Sheep Meadow and Cherry Hill, around Belvedere Castle and the Glade. She loved the ruined beauty of Bethesda Fountain, the bird sanctuary, and Gapstow Bridge.
Renee Philips, an illustrator of children’s books, used to bring her daughter to the park and she would often find Diane wrapped in a blanket, her nose in a book, while Amy played fearlessly on the swings. Renee had never seen such concentration. She was always so worried about her daughter hurting herself she could never concentrate on anything, but Diane just read and read, never looking up. Finally the two women got to talking and Renee asked, “Aren’t you ever worried about your daughter? She may fall—skin her knee—something.” And Diane said no, she wasn’t worried, and besides Amy had to find out about life—she had to learn how to be courageous, how to survive. Diane couldn’t teach her that.
With Renee, Diane talked mostly about what she wished for her daughters: “Independence and purity, if that combination is possible.” She said once about growing up: “It’s a testing of the thousands of prohibitions that are put in front of you. I mean, can you go out without rubbers? And not catch pneumonia? I mean, I’ve done it! It’s terrific to find out you can, and then you don’t know what to say to your children about going out without rubbers. You know damn well it doesn’t matter, because you know colds don’t come from that.”
During this period Diane was still going up to Condé Nast periodically, lugging the Arbus portfolio into the Vogue or Glamour art department, hoping to convince an editor that Allan should be booked for another editorial spread. Ever since they had stopped collaborating in fashion, it was no longer any “fun.” It was more difficult to go after jobs alone, and without any of Diane’s imaginative suggestions, let alone her companionship, it was now simply a way of paying the rent. He could hardly wait to leave the studio at the end of a sitting and rush off to mime class. He had bought a Vespa and would zoom around the city on it.
His friend Bob Brown kept encouraging him to audition for the theater. Off-Broadway was flourishing—Circle in the Square had given actors like George C. Scott, Jason Robards, and Géraldine Page their “big break.” True, Off-Broadway didn’t pay—Robards was being paid $25 a week to play Hickey in The Iceman Cometh—but Allan should try it before it was too late. He was almost forty—a fact that drove him into a deep depression whenever he thought about it. For a while, to divert himself, he took piano lessons from a young jazz musician, and on an impulse he cut off Doon’s hair. “Oh, she is gorgeous,” Diane wrote to the Meserveys, who were now in Boston. “Like an available angel.” She added that she was terribly behind in photography. “It’s almost as if I’ll never know how to do it.”
But when she did photograph, it intoxicated her. Then she floated in a “sort of weird rarefied air” and she felt “in danger of never coming home…it’s like being in the ocean when the waves make you feel so strong [you believe you can] swim to Europe…there’s an illusion involved which could prove its own trap.”
Diane and Howard didn’t see much of each other during this period. “I think it was hard for her to be so cut off from her brother,” Peggy Nemerov says. “We’d keep on inviting Diane and Allan up to Bennington to see our garden, but they never came.”
Howard, meanwhile, was resigned to academia. “A fairly agreeable way to make a dollar,” he would say; “a perfect place to hide out.” Between his classes he could write, dream, play the piano to his heart’s content. He and Stanley Edgar Hyman helped build a strong literature department, inviting novelists like Barnard Malamud to teach.
When his work wasn’t going well, Howard still suffered from acute depressions which he could sometimes talk himself out of during long strolls with Malamud across the Vermont hills. Malamud would usually begin the conversation, often completing a veritable monologue before Howard would abruptly respond. Then he would describe his nightmares, his dreams. He would tell Malamud about his sister Diane (“They were obviously very close,” Malamud says); he would describe her ghostly photographs, her sly way with words.
In his novel Federigo, or the Power of Love he had drawn from Diane and Allan’s fashion world and had characterized some of the people he’d met through them—sex-obsessed couples who were having affairs without conviction. He imagined his sister and brother-in-law leading a fabled, bittersweet existence—“modern—chic—the kind I imagined Daddy lived, in a way. Diane and Allan made so much more money than I did, and I envied their money and what I thought was their glamorous life style.”
Diane, for her part, envied her brother’s literary versatility, his growing reputation. She still scribbled in a journal, still had fantasies of herself as a writer. In fact, some years later when she published her first photographs in Bazaar accompanied by her own text, she described herself as a “writer/photographer.”
She was pleased when Howard won the Kenyon Review Fellowship in fiction, and when his third book of poetry, The Salt Garden, was published to uniformly excellent reviews. These poems, about man’s divided nature and the workings of the human mind, are filled with images of reflecting mirrors, cameras, and the inside of dreams. The New York Times called The Salt Garden “important and beautiful.”
Howard hoped he would capture some of the major prizes, but Wallace Stevens’ Complete Poems won the Pulitzer. He tried not to be bitter, but he was. He yearned for applause, for more recognition. He felt he was being overlooked, ignored, because he wasn’t writing in the present mold. He no longer measured himself against Auden or T. S. Eliot—Blake and Robert Frost were his guides, and while he still valued irony, he now regarded simplicity as the most vital element in a poem. He continued to work slowly and carefully and often drank far into the night. In Howard’s world—the world of John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, William Carlos Williams—the failure to obtain money, let alone recognition, was almost intolerable.
Occasionally Howard would read his poetry at seminars and colleges around the country, and this gave him some feedback. He enjoyed the fuss that was made over him—admirers holding out his books for him to autograph. Elbert Lenrow remembers going to a reading at the 92nd Street “Y” in New York and afterward a line of people stretched down the aisle toward the stage, where Howard stood graciously greeting everyone. And Diane was there, too, watching silently nearby. Except for these readings, Howard did not travel much. He would always return as quickly as possible to Bennington after any public appearance—home to Peggy and his sons. He saw Diane and his parents infrequently. He assumes his father was aware of his published novels and poetry, but “he never made comments about anything I did, possibly because I’d made no money from my writing.”
As usual, David Nemerov was busy with another new Russeks—this one opened at the Savoy-Pla
za Hotel in 1955. Nemerov had always wanted to be in this area: “You get the out-of-town tourists and the rich New Yorkers,” he said at one of the Friday-night dinners. He loved the elegance of 57th and Fifth—the presence and competition of Bonwit, Bergdorf, Bendel, and Jay Thorpe. The new Russeks was furnished with French antique furniture, dark blue walls; the outside was tinted concrete.
Russeks Fifth Avenue, the flagship store, was still operating, but at a $120 million deficit. The Russeks empire (stores in Chicago, Brooklyn, Cross Island Shopping Center) had been bought by a group of Chicago investors, among them the Pritzcy brothers, who maintained that they were going to modernize and expand. They owned controlling stock, but Nemerov remained chairman of the board.
Diane frequently dropped by the Fifth Avenue Russeks to visit her father. She often brought her daughters along and the three of them would remain in Nemerov’s office until conversation lagged or he was called away. Then they might ride up and down the elevators, stopping at various floors to try on the latest sweaters or blouses or shoes, but Diane would quickly tire of shopping (it reminded her of the hours she’d spent shopping with her mother when every purchase became a drama), so she would hustle her daughters home and cook supper—usually chili. It was so often chili, in fact, that Allan would groan, “Oh, no! Not chili again!” every time the dish appeared on the table. Diane no longer wanted to spend time in the kitchen, so she usually served her family “poor food” (her term)—Spam, hot dogs, and spaghetti didn’t take long to fix. However, when they had guests, she would broil a chicken or prepare a vegetable stew. “She could be a terrific cook when she felt like it,” Tina Fredericks says. Tina would come to the Sunday-night suppers at the Arbuses’ which had become almost a ritual for special friends in the mid-fifties—friends like the Eliots, like Cheech, like a new friend, the actor Robert Brown, “who was so handsome you’d gasp when you saw him,” says actress Tammy Grimes, a friend of Brown’s who would occasionally accompany him to the Arbuses’ along with her then husband, Christopher Plummer.
Diane Arbus Page 18