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BY THE MID-SIXTIES DIANE had become a familiar figure to most working photographers in New York City. She was seen everywhere—at art openings, at happenings, at the Judson Memorial Church, at Pop Art collector Ethel Scull’s party held at a Nathan’s hot-dog stand, at Tiger Morse’s fashion show, which took place at the Henry Hudson Health Club with stoned models showing off lingerie, then falling into the pool. “Diane was at every spectacle, every parade,” Bob Adelman says, “right up to the Gay Rights Liberation March of 1970.”
Adelman, who eloquently documented the civil-rights movement in the pages of Look magazine, recalls seeing Diane at “most of the protests against the Vietnam war. But she would never plunge into the crowd like the rest of us who were all going for a sense of immediacy, of grabbing on to the entire vista—we wanted to record the action. But Diane hung back on the fringes—and she’d pick out one face, like the pimply guy with the flag or the man with his hat over his heart.”
On assignment, in competition with other (mostly male) photographers, Diane could turn colder or more aggressive. Sometimes at an art opening or press conference she would hop about almost manically, click-clicking away at people until they’d run through their repertoire of public faces and stood exposed and blinking under the glare of her flash. “She used to drive people crazy at parties,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She’d behave like the first paparazzi. She didn’t talk much, but she’d swoop like a vulture at somebody and then blaze away. And she would wait outside a place for hours in any kind of weather to get the kind of picture she wanted.”
Sometimes it seemed as if every event in the sixties had been organized for the benefit of TV and still photographers. The media were creating a turbulent new world, based not on wealth and achievement but on being promotable (“Everybody can be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol predicted). So photographers were involved as never before in recording all this voracious hunger for publicity, for notoriety. Sometimes dozens of them would compete for a single image: at Truman Capote’s party for Katharine Graham, photographers went crazy as to whom to photograph first—Margaret Truman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, Henry Ford… But once again Diane would avoid the obvious image—the costume, the behavior, the visible effect—and would zero in close-up on a mismatched couple. The main detail, the woman’s pale, broad, freckled back.
She knew she had an advantage on the job in the company of men. In the beginning she was ignored, but even after she got better known she could still get away with a lot of things a man couldn’t. She’d appear insecure about her equipment; she couldn’t always load film into a camera; she’d flirt. “I’d stop at nothing to get the picture I wanted,” she told one of her students, Mark Haven. “And being a woman helped.”
She could usually sell most of the pictures she took, but she would refuse credit if the image didn’t come up to her standards. She was out to make a personal statement, no matter what the circumstances or assignment—she wished to be compared with no one, but to be better than the best. If she had a need to exaggerate the physical and psychological horror in her subjects, it was because she saw that beyond these exaggerations might lie transcendental worlds of absolute value. She would always go on exploring the question of identity versus illusion in her photography.
You see both in her ghostly, voluptuously daydreaming portrait of the ravaged former debutante Brenda Frazier taken for Esquire (“Frazier and I talked about nail polish,” Diane told John Putnam). When she photographed the Armando Orsinis, the Frederick Eberstadts, the John Gruens for a “Fashionable Couples” series in Bazaar, she insisted that they hold the same pose for up to six hours until, exhausted, they all revealed a terrifying sense of mutual dependency.
And she kept on scrutinizing the stoic self-sufficiency inherent in her subjects, as with the portrait she took of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in Esquire’s editorial offices. She had only a half-hour. Mrs. Oswald was there to sell her son’s letters to the magazine. “She was peddling all the artifacts she had,” Diane said. “And not only that, she was incredibly proud—like she had done the most terrific thing in the world…she looked like a practical nurse…and she was smiling—it seemed unnatural. Why was she smiling? What did she have to be so pleased about? We talked a little. She was dying to talk, you know? In fact, this was her big moment. [Her son had assassinated President Kennedy] and it was as if he had done something remarkable and she looked as if she’d manipulated the whole thing for forty years since she conceived him. She had this incredible look of authority, of pride.”
As Diane grew more confident, the subject matter in her own work grew more extreme. Her constant journeys into the world of transvestites, drag queens, hermaphrodites, and transsexuals may have helped define her view of what it means to experience sexual conflict. She once followed “two friends” from street to apartment, and the resulting portrait suggests an almost sinister sexual power between these mannish females. (The larger, more traditionally feminine figure stands with her arm possessively around the shoulder of her boyish partner. In another shot the couple is seen lying on their rumpled bed; one of them is in the middle of a sneeze—it is both intimate and creepy.)
Diane also photographed drag queens in their seedy little rooms at the Hotel Seventeen near Stuyvesant Park, and she spent a day with a transvestite at the World’s Fair in Flushing; they had an attack of giggling when he/she didn’t know whether to use the ladies’ or the men’s room.
Lately Diane had become friendly with “Vicki,” a huge, six-foot man who was a hooker; Vicki called himself “Vicki Strasberg” (after Susan Strasberg). Vicki took hormones and gorged on food so “she” would be plumper and more sexually desirable; she always dressed as a woman and whored as a woman, and supposedly no customer ever complained. Wherever they went, everybody ogled Vicki. She had “the most unbelievable walk,” Diane recalled. “I couldn’t see the man in her.”
Vicki was dangerous, mean. She knew how to use a knife and she tortured her cats and once she stabbed a customer and was sent to the Tombs. Vicki adored Diane and gave her presents (which she’d stolen from department stores) and invited her to her birthday party at her hotel at Broadway and 100th Street. “The lobby was like Hades,” Diane recalled. “People lounging around; the whites of their eyes were purple.” A stench, a congealment, a heaviness pervaded the place, and the carpet was littered with broken syringes and orange peels. The elevator didn’t work, so Diane climbed the stairs, stepping over inert figures on each landing. She arrived at Vicki’s shabby room carrying a birthday cake and Vicki was waiting for her; she’d attempted to decorate a little, but the balloons she’d bought were sticking to the wall and to the bureau instead of floating in the air as she’d planned. For a few moments Diane wondered where Vicki’s other friends might be and then she realized she was the only guest at the party. After a while she took photographs of Vicki semi-toothless and laughing on her bed, exposing her huge thighs. Near her balloon remains stuck on the side of the bureau.
Nobody would buy Diane’s portraits of drag queens at first. “In the early sixties drag queens were sociosexual phenomena,” Andy Warhol writes. He thinks Arbus was ahead of her time in terms of photographing them, because “drag queens weren’t even accepted in freak circles until 1967.” In the meantime, the more she photographed transvestites, the more she connected their sexual identity with “nature,” “personality,” and “style.” To a transvestite, sexual identity seemed to be more a predilection than a necessity of gender.
Finally, when Diane photographed the man in curlers and the woman smoking a cigar, she was able to capture the confusion of male and female identities trapped in a single personality.
Occasionally Diane would show some of her latest work prints of transvestites to Walker Evans. He also liked the portrait of Norman Mailer, which she’d taken for the New York Times. In this picture Mailer is clutching his crotch.
“You actually get a sense of what it’s like to be Norman,” Evans told his wife later. (As for Mailer, he commented, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.”)
Evans was extremely pleased by Diane’s progress. He wrote: “This artist is daring, extremely gifted, and a born huntress. There may be something naive about her work if there is anything naive about the devil… Arbus’ style is all in her subject matter. Her camera technique simply stops at a kind of automatic, seemingly effortless competence. That doesn’t matter: we are satisfied to have her make her own photography speak clearly. Her distinction is in her eye, which is often an eye for the grotesque and gamey; an eye cultivated just for this to show you fear in a handful of dust.” He urged her to keep showing her latest pictures to John Szarkowski, the new head of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art.
Szarkowski had already seen Diane’s early work done in 35 millimeter (the eccentrics, Puerto Rican kids), but he hadn’t liked it very much because “they weren’t pictures somehow.” However, he’d been impressed by Diane’s elegance, her high intelligence, and her ambition… “there was something untouchable about that ambition.”
They became friends and she continued to bring stacks of work prints to his office at the museum, and as she began photographing more at contests and parties and in the street—almost always using her flash—her rough, uneasy style evolved and then her subjects began alternating between freaks and eccentrics and the frankly middle-class, all posed in the same grave, troubling manner. By 1964 she was really collaborating with the people she photographed—collaborating and confronting them as she hunted for their private faces. However, her central concern remained unwavering—it focused on the nature of being alone and our pitiful range of attempted defenses against it. Szarkowski realized that “Diane was a marvelous photographer—nobody else photographed the way she did. Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality.” On top of that she was running totally counter to the 1930s-’40s documentary photographers, who had tended to be almost benevolent to their subject matter and serene in their technique. Like Robert Frank’s, Diane’s attitude toward her camera was raw and unsettling. Szarkowski began re-examining his own definitions of documentary photography.
But at the same time he didn’t want to lose sight of the history or traditions of the medium—possibly a reason he suggested to Diane that she look more closely at Sander’s portraits (although today Szarkowski insists “Diane had already developed her own distinctive way of working”). However, studying Sander was just another step to work more deeply into “the endlessly seductive puzzle of sight.”
August Sander lived in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and from shortly after the First World War until Hitler put an end to his project in 1932 for being “anti-social,” he tried to record and document every archetype in his country—peasants, thieves, lawyers, pastry chefs, artists, Nazis, girls in their confirmation dresses, Jews, doctors, bankers. All his portraits are direct and confrontational, but never threatening. He didn’t want to make anyone look bad. “The portrait is your mirror,” he would say. “It’s you.” So Sander’s sitters would look at him without expression and give him back the sense of self-reflection he wanted. Diane was reminded by Sander that the camera has an infinite capacity to reveal.
She had been thinking about photographing archetypes—indeed, she already had (teen-agers, flower girls, weightlifters)—and often referred to herself as “an anthropologist of sorts.” Lisette Model repeatedly told her that the more specific you are, the more general you’ll be. “I thought if I photographed some generalized human being, everybody would recognize it,” Diane said. “It would be like the Common Man or something.”
Avedon was studying Sander, too—studying the frontal symmetrical compositions, the crucial confrontations with subject matter. Avedon wanted to pursue the prototypical, but he wanted to assemble prototypical celebrities—the instantly recognizable, like Eisenhower and Malcolm X; the bigger, the better. He resented being known as just a fashion photographer, so he was doing a book—his second* —and Marvin Israel was designing it and James Baldwin, his high-school classmate, was writing the text. It would deal with America after John Kennedy’s assassination—deal with the loneliness and violence in the country, deal with the rise of civil rights. Avedon’s photographs would range from horrific blurred candids taken inside a madhouse to marriages at City Hall. There were studies of a naked Allen Ginsberg, a doleful Marilyn Monroe, sinister, sneering pop singers, Arthur Miller with five-o’clock shadow, and harsh portraits of Adlai Stevenson, John L. Lewis, and Bertrand Russell.
Skin—that, oh, so permanent mask—was another focus: skin harshly lit against a bare studio background—aging, flabby, baggy skin, bleary eyes, dry, cracking mouths. Diane usually ignored age in a person’s face, but Avedon in Nothing Personal emphasized it—to him, age was a defining condition.
Avedon often had insomnia, and when he couldn’t sleep, he would call Diane and they would talk for hours. Occasionally they attended parties together, armed with their cameras. They photographed a reading that William Burroughs gave at which Larry Rivers, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol were present; they dropped by a fund-raising for Abby Hoffman held on a tenement rooftop—at this gathering the Fugs played obscene songs. They also participated in symposiums at one time or another at the New School along with Cornell Capa and Irving Penn, and they would discuss styles of portraiture. In public, Diane behaved as if she were in awe of Avedon—she would repeat how she envied his technical prowess, how she could never do the things he did.
Once she and Avedon agreed to be part of a workshop Bruce Davidson was holding in his studio on West 12th Street. Davidson had been experiencing a terrible creative block. “Suddenly I could not take a picture—couldn’t hold a camera in my hand,” and he’d been Cartier-Bresson’s protégé and with the prestigious Magnum photo agency for close to a decade. Famous for his pictures of Freedom Riders, the first moon launching at Cape Canaveral—“but suddenly I couldn’t touch a light meter—a piece of film,” he says. “Maybe it had something to do with the break-up of my first marriage or that I’d just had a lousy time trying to make it big as a fashion photographer.” For whatever reasons, he was teaching, “trying to get my creative juices going again.” He’d selected ten students from various walks of life—among them a suburban housewife, a retired businessman, and a high-school dropout named John Gossage, who’d spent most of his time memorizing the entire photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Gossage went on to become a fine photographer as well as a special friend of Diane’s.
“And I asked Kertesz, Avedon, and Arbus to participate by showing their work for an evening,” Davidson says. “Kertesz brought his photographs of a naked man sitting on a rock, a woman in repose on a sofa, a cloud next to a tall building. Avedon showed his pictures of tormented patients in a mental hospital, an unmasked look at Marilyn Monroe. Diane brought in her portraits of an overweight family lying naked in a meadow, midgets posed in a bedroom, and a widow sitting in her ornate bedroom. Each photographer gave clues to their inner worlds.”
After one class, Davidson says, “Diane and I went for a walk around the Village and she began discussing Erich Salomon’s candid snapshots, and Jacques Henri Lartigue, who’d been photographing in France since he was a kid-before World War I.” Lartigue was fascinated by movement and he’d been recording it for almost fifty years—with enormous exuberance and a sense of the ridiculous: cars racing, people and dogs leaping, jumping, falling, caught in mid-air. “Diane started making me aware of the history of photography,” Davidson says, but still he couldn’t photograph.
A few weeks passed and Diane invited him to Atlantic City, ostensibly to see a burlesque show with her, but he sensed she was trying to get him interested in looking at the world again. He agreed to go with her, but said he wouldn’t take any pictures, although through force of habit he brought along his camera. As they drove across the Ge
orge Washington Bridge and later through the tackiness of the old summer resort, he resisted looking out the window, though passing the Boardwalk he thought he could smell saltwater taffy. They attended the burlesque show, sitting through endless routines featuring flabby strippers and bad comics. Afterward Diane went backstage and showed Davidson where she’d photographed—in the dusty wings and filthy, airless dressing rooms.
For the rest of the afternoon they drove around a series of smog-covered little towns, very quiet in the heat, pausing for a while by the ocean, which was blood red in color. “I’ll never forget it,” Davidson says. A foul odor drifted through the thick, hot breeze. Air and water were obviously polluted, but nobody knew about pollution yet or that factories were dumping their wastes improperly. It was so hot that crowds were paddling about, despite the scarlet waters, and Diane took pictures of some of the bathers, who glared straight into her camera as she talked to them.
“You’re better taking pictures of people looking in the opposite direction,” she told Davidson, who had a sudden urge to photograph the bathers his way. But he didn’t, and it was getting late, so they started to walk back to the car, past a gas station and a motel. Suddenly they came upon a squat pastel stucco house set back from the highway on an incline. Behind the house was a yard filled with ugly plaster statues. A truck roared by, and with that Davidson started click-clicking away at the landscape with his camera. Then a fat lady with crazy eyes waddled into view shouting angrily that this was private property and she chased him away. Diane began to laugh and they ran back to the car. Later they parked by a lake “which did not have red water.” Davidson took a picture of Diane in her bathing suit. “Diane loved to swim.”
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