Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  But she talked more about Weegee’s pictures in the New York Daily News. She admired news photography because it was factual. And Weegee’s images were factual in particular and they had a demonic edge to them, a pitiless quality she liked.

  Weegee (born Arthur Fellig) got his nickname—an allusion to the Ouija board—because he always arrived early at newsmaking catastrophes. Recording violence was his specialty. His 1945 book, Naked City (which included his pictures of bloody corpses and firemen lugging body bags away from burning buildings), was later turned into both a TV series and a movie that made him famous.

  Recently, Diane had gone with him on assignment in his battered Chevrolet, which was equipped with police radio and makeshift darkroom in the trunk. He was up until dawn, he told her. The infrared film and flash he used completely concealed his presence; he often prowled the beaches of Coney Island on hot summer nights and would take pictures of couples making love on the sand, or he would sneak into movie theaters and snap pictures of kids necking in the balcony.

  Diane admired the extremes he went to when he zeroed in with his direct flash and wide-angle lens on every kind of disaster—suicide, murder, fire, flood, plane crash. And if an image failed to compose itself to his satisfaction, he would enlarge or crop it to bring it closer to the viewer. Often he would eliminate the background entirely by burning it a deep, flat black in his darkroom.

  On assignment she was taking photographs of the black rock singer James Brown to illustrate a piece Doon was writing for New York magazine. She went first to Brown’s home in New Jersey to photograph him lounging under his beauty-parlor-sized hair dryer, and choosing glittering, costumes for his show. Next she photographed him in performance at the Apollo Theatre. She described the experience as “wild—it was like he was presiding over some mass freakout—the audience seemed crazed—scared.” But she loved the music—a Latin sound mixed with rock-and-roll beat. At the climax Brown sang “Please! Please!” and his voice got frayed and hoarse and he sank to his knees and writhed about before collapsing in a heap and covering himself with a voluminous gold cape. The audience’s screams were frenzied.

  It reminded her of the Presley phenomenon back in the 1950s. Then there had been shock and wild acclaim. Nobody had known what to make of him. Nobody knew what to make of Brown.

  Going home on the subway from the Apollo, Diane ran into Susan Brownmiller, who had covered the Brown concert for the Village Voice. “Don’t you love freaks?” Diane demanded suddenly. “I just love freaks.”

  She was not exaggerating. She had grown increasingly fond of her collection of freaks and odd things at Hubert’s—the living skeleton, the embalmed whale, the ventriloquist with his two-headed cat. Diane still turned up at Hubert’s almost every day. When the museum closed in 1965, she took a picture of the core group, including Presto the Fire Eater, Congo the Jungle Creep, the midget Andy, and Potato Chip Manzini, the escape artist wrapped in chains.

  “Diane said the picture would be published in the Herald Tribune, along with a story about Hubert’s demise,” Presto says. “But then Charlie Lucas, who ran Hubert’s, refused to sign a release—he’d been in the picture, too, so the picture wasn’t published. But Diane gave us each a copy.” Presto still has his copy of the picture—grainy, blurred—in his home in New Jersey; so does Harold Smith, formerly of Ringling Brothers, now of the 42nd Street Penny Arcade. Smith keeps his Arbus print in a manila folder in his hotel room.

  Before the museum shut its doors, Diane asked for and got most of the eight-by-ten glossies of freaks that had been plastered across Hubert’s walls since the 1920s. Presto says, “She walked off with stacks of freak pictures in her arms.”

  Sometime in 1966 Diane contracted hepatitis. She was treated by her therapist, who was also a medical doctor. (Earlier he’d prescribed antidepressants for her “blues” and she’d got some relief.) For a while he seems to have cured her hepatitis too, and she was very grateful since she was photographing day and night. Most of her latest pictures were up in John Szarkowski’s office at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum’s photography department was very casual and friendly then—the research library was still open to the public without an appointment, so that young photographers could browse through Edward Weston’s portfolios. And Szarkowski had not yet become so powerful or remote; his office door was never shut and Diane would wander in and possibly Robert Frank would be there, or Walker Evans, or Grace Mayer—Steichen’s trusted assistant—who had a tiny office down the hall.

  Everybody in the department knew that Szarkowski was scheduling a major show for 1967 to mark the end of documentary photography’s romantic, benevolent vision of the world as expressed in the “Family of Man” exhibit. Replacing it would be the highly stylized, personalized approach of Diane’s freaks and eccentrics pictures. Garry Winogrand’s disturbing confrontations with animals and people, and Lee Friedlander’s images bouncing off plate-glass windows, storefronts, cars. “These are a new generation of photographers,” Szarkowski would write, “totally different from 1930s and 1940s photographers (such as Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Cartier-Bresson), all of whom either wanted to honor humanity” or use their art for social reform. “Arbus, Winogrand and Friedlander make no such claims,” Szarkowski continued. “What unites them is not a style or a sensibility…each has a distinctive and personal sense of what photography is as well as the meaning of it.” Diane, however, was the most radical aesthetically, since she would pose her subjects like a portrait painter and then record them in a snapshot structure. This clashing of contradictory styles was having a startling effect on her imagery, as is evident in her portrait of identical twin sisters; the combination of styles seems to pinpoint the eerie visual quality twins project—that of being both symmetrical and ambivalent. To Diane, twins represented a paradox she longed to continue exploring and she did. She would photograph actress Estelle Parsons’ twin daughters over and over again; she would photograph elderly twins and twins married to twins, and each picture seemed to ask what is it like to live in a body that is virtually indistinguishable from your twin’s? Diane suspected that the ultimate challenge was to try creating a separate identity.

  Naturally she brought the twins portrait to Szarkowski and he decided’ to use it—he planned to exhibit at least thirty Arbus pictures. Diane, however, was reluctant to have her work shown at all. She kept saying no, even after Walker Evans told her she was a fool and Szarkowski had blown up some of her prints to mammoth proportions in an effort to convince her.

  She was afraid she’d be misunderstood—afraid that her pictures would only be considered on the crudest level, with no self-reflection on the part of the viewer. Months went by. She told Szarkowski in a note she no longer liked some of the pictures he’d chosen—early pictures she’d I taken in 1962-4 while she was struggling to find her themes, her style.

  Maybe she was still sick with hepatitis, she concluded, but she thought her latest pictures—like the twins—were better. So in the fall of 1966 Szarkowski would come down to the Charles Street house and go over Diane’s latest contact sheets and then she would print up some of his selections. She thanked him for his “steadying hand.”

  Eventually she did agree to be part of “New Documents,” although she assumed from the start that most people would see only what they wanted to see in her misfits—the surface distortion. But once she agreed, she couldn’t stop talking about the exhibit, Garry Winogrand says. “She imagined all sorts of things coming out of the show.” She kept repeating how lucky she was, how terrifically lucky.

  Winogrand, coming to the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department while Szarkowski was editing the exhibit, got to know Diane “a little bit.” He says, “Before that I’d been seeing her around for a couple of years taking pictures. A couple of us used to hang out at the same street corner—57th Street and Fifth.” “Us” meant Joel Meyerowitz and Tod Papageorge, who often accompanied Winogrand in his wanderings around New Yor
k. He was known as “the duke of street photographers” because his energy was so prodigious and he seemed more alive than anyone else to the endless visual possibilities in the frantic, brooding city.

  Winogrand says he felt uneasy with Diane. “I thought her idea of being an artist was very different from mine. A shooting had to be hard to do; that’s why she lugged so much equipment around, I thought. Taking a picture couldn’t be easy—it couldn’t be pleasurable—because then it wasn’t art.”

  It was true that Diane always appeared weighed down with equipment. “It was like her security blanket,” Chris von Wangenheim said. John Putnam recalls that earlier that year she carried “two Mamiya cameras, two flashes, sometimes a Rollei, a tripod, all sorts of lenses, light meters, film, when she was on assignment to photograph the American Art Scene for Bazaar.”

  It took her weeks to complete, but this portfolio (some thirteen studies in all) turned out to be possibly her liveliest and most accessible portraiture. Out of it came an exuberant shot of Frank Stella on a tilt and displaying a goofy, toothless grin; James Rosenquist caressing his armpit; a bare-chested, handsome Lucas Samaras (who later evolved from paintings to Polaroids and said recently, “Diane Arbus influenced me”); Ken Noland wearing suit and tie; Claes Oldenburg clowning around with his wife. Obviously, Diane enjoyed this assignment, since she knew many of the artists personally—enjoyment radiates from the photographs, especially in her affectionate portrait of Richard Lindner, a tiny, wry man of great intelligence whose gigantic, earthy paintings of ferocious women, often nude, against a backdrop of sinister Times Square, had been construed as Pop Art; as a result, he was hugely successful in the sixties—by mistake, he would say. This amused him greatly.

  Also included in this portfolio was a small shot of Marvin Israel, the only surrealist in the bunch, standing impassively in front of what looked like a blank canvas.

  Some of the contacts were eventually published in the Village Voice, along with an article by Owen Edwards describing Israel as “Diane Arbus’s closest friend.” The piece itself was entitled “Marvin Israel, the Mentor Who Doesn’t Want to Be Famous.” In it Israel was quoted as saying, “Diane and I shared everything—opinions, ideas.”

  She was seeing him now three or four times a week. Whenever she visited her mother in Palm Beach, she “phoned this Marvin person every day. He was obviously very important to her.” (When Mrs. Nemerov finally met Israel, he told her, “Diane doesn’t love Allan anymore, she loves me.”) Certainly she relied increasingly on his advice and counsel; she referred to him as “my Svengali” and spoke of being “under his spell,” “in his thrall.” Although it was understood that they both led independent lives, she tried to keep herself available for him and was known to drop everything just to be with him for a short time. She loved to come to his studio on lower Fifth Avenue when he was designing a new book. And there was a deep darkness inside Diane that responded to Israel’s violent paintings (as later expressed in a series of studies of dogs alternately embracing and tearing at each other’s guts). He was increasingly involved with his own projects, although he was still concerned with promoting and advising Diane as well as advising Richard Avedon (who calls him “my biggest influence”). But the two men often quarreled. If Diane and he fought, nobody knew about their arguments.

  “In public, Diane always kept her distance with Marvin,” Emile de Antonio says. Even when they were among their coterie of intimates (attorney Jay Gold, Bea Feitler, Larry Shainberg), they remained cool and impersonal with each other. Sometimes they played intellectual “head games”—they were both expert at that. “It was like a weird battle,” said the late Chris von Wangenheim, “because Diane was so mystic and intuitive and Marvin could be so stubborn—calculating—cold.” And then they would go to a restaurant and Diane would seem to disappear. “Often it was as if she didn’t have any identity when she was around Marvin,” says literary agent Diane Cleaver, who had dinner with them a couple of times.

  Occasionally he would abruptly criticize her clothes, her friends, her hesitant way of speaking. “Speak up!” he’d command when she was trying to explain something at a party. When she ignored him or escaped into a daze, he’d repeat, “Speak up!” and when she wouldn’t, he’d get wildly angry. (Diane used to remark how she was struck by female powerlessness in the face of male power, by the phenomenon of women who are strong with one another and in their work, but who break beneath the domination of male mentor or lover—they feel they must play the passive role.)

  However, the next day Israel’s outburst would be forgotten and he would be trying to get Diane a book contract for her transvestite pictures or phoning Harper’s Bazaar about a possible assignment for her. According to an assistant in the production department, “Marvin kept in touch with Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel, who were art-directing Bazaar together. He’d keep at them with possible suggestions for Diane, so she worked a lot for the magazine.” And he was promoting her elsewhere with people who didn’t know her work as well. Bob Cato, then Vice President for Creative Affairs at CBS Records, recalls “Marvin making a lunch date with me at the Ground Floor, and when he arrived, Diane was with him—very shy, withdrawn. The entire meal was taken up with Marvin very eloquently and with great dignity seeing if there was some way Diane could be used. I’d just okayed the hiring of Eugene Smith to photograph some recording sessions. Marvin thought that possibly Diane might do that, too. He so obviously believed she was a singular talent—he spoke about her with such understanding and intensity and tenderness. I was very impressed.”

  * His first: Observations, with text by Truman Capote.

  * In 1979 they met in Model’s black apartment to go over possible layouts. “I was frankly very apprehensive,” Model says. For a while they just stared at each other in silence, and then Model remarked, “Until now I’ve always been afraid of you, Marvin.” And he said nothing for a moment and then he answered, “This is ridiculous. I’ve always been afraid of you.” And after that, Model said, “we got along all right.”

  * She often professed ignorance about the technical side of photography. She once told a class she was never sure about loading a camera, confiding that she was always afraid she might insert a roll of fresh film incorrectly into the winding sprocket.

  28

  OVER THE 1966 CHRISTMAS holidays Diane flew to Jamaica to shoot children’s fashions for an entire special section of the Sunday New York Times.

  Times fashion editor Pat Peterson came along to coordinate the project and brought her son, Juan, with her, as well as her husband, Gus Peterson, also a fashion photographer. Diane arrived with Amy in tow. Her camera case was lashed to her shoulders and she never let it out of her sight. Pinned inside the case were Allan’s elaborate instructions for color exposures. Since Diane hadn’t shot much color, she was very nervous about getting something wrong. She was being paid $5000 for the shoot and she wanted everything to go well.

  In the hot bright mornings she would rise very early and go swimming by herself. Then she would come back to the hotel. Pat might pass her room on her way to breakfast. The door would be open, the shades pulled down, and Diane would be scribbling away in her journal, surrounded by darkness.

  The first days Diane scouted locations with Pat in and around Kingston selecting several settings; one that proved to be her favorite was a grassy meadow overlooking Montego Bay. Then Diane met with the models Pat had chosen—none of them professional. Some were white kids on vacation with their parents. A great many were black boys and girls from the Jamaican slums and they were alternately sullen and awkward in front of Diane’s camera when she shot them dressed in expensive sunsuits, terrycloth robes, denims, and caps. Because she was so nervous about the results, she airmailed the unprocessed film to Allan in New York. But she needn’t have worried. The pictures turned out to be among the most evocative of her career—some editors believe these pictures were a steppingstone in the changing styles of fashion photography, certainly of children’s
fashion. The pictures vibrate—they are warmly sensual images, alive with the secret meanings of what it’s like to be young. It’s startling to see how well she documented the kids’ ironic, wary, role-playing stances.*

  After work she and the Petersons did “touristy” things. They’d wander through the markets and shops in Kingston and at one of the shops Diane chose an album encrusted with shells. “I think I’ll buy this for Marvin,” she said. She wrote him a letter every day.

  In the evenings they might go out to a nightclub. “Diane would put on an Yves Saint-Laurent dress and look smashing.” Usually she wore her “uniform” of cut-off jeans and sandals. She’d got very tan and her hair was cropped short as a boy’s.

  At the end of their stay Diane and Pat went back to the market and came upon a little shop “where an artist had concocted these exquisite hand-painted crowns. He only had two left. We bought them, but we could tell he didn’t want to part with them both—his face screwed up with emotion as he packed them very tenderly for us in tissue paper. The next morning, driving to the airport, I had my crown on my lap (I still have it at home, and every time I see it I think of Diane). Suddenly I looked across at Diane and asked, ‘Where’s your crown?’ and she said, ‘I gave it back to the artist.’ Just the way she said it moved me to tears.”

  When the Petersons, Diane, and Amy got back to New York, Allan was at the air terminal with his girlfriend, Mariclare Costello, to meet them. A few days later Diane wrote to the Petersons, telling them “how much the trip to Jamaica had meant to her and how wonderful we’d been to her and Amy and how she considered us her ‘family’ now.

  “She wanted us to choose one of her photographs from the upcoming show at the museum and I said, ‘Sure,’ but I forgot, and a couple of weeks later Diane phoned and said, ‘You want one of my pictures, don’t you?’ She seemed hurt that I hadn’t chosen one immediately. So I ran over to the Charles Street house that very afternoon and I chose one of the nudist family and Diane signed it in her childish scrawl, ‘to Gus and Pat, love Diane Arbus.’ ”