“New Documents,” the photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened March 6, 1967, was probably the high point of Diane’s life.Nothing indicates more clearly her excitement than the hundreds of announcements she sent out to friends and acquaintances on postcard-sized replicas of her portraits. She sent them to the Alex Eliots in Greece, to Pati Hill in France, to John Putnam, Phyllis Carton, Harold Hayes, Robert Benton, John A. Williams, Barbara Forst, Renee Philips, Joseph Mitchell, Larry Shainberg, Lucas Samaras, hairdresser and rock singer Monti Rockill, Mr. and Mrs. Gay Talese, and many others. All had individual handwritten messages. “I urge you to come,” she scrawled to photographer Irene Fay, and to her old English teacher Elbert Lenrow she added, “Do you remember me? Diane Nemerov—Fieldston—’39-’40?”
She talked to Grace Mayer about inviting pianists Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, Mr. & Mrs. Leonard Bernstein—“he recommended me for a Guggenheim… Eddie Carmel, he’s a Jewish giant I’m pursuing… Algernon Black, Ethical Culture…”
She passed out postcards as well—dropping one off at Tiger Morse’s Teeny Weeny boutique and leaving one for David, her hairdresser, and others for the Tom Morgans and Mary Frank. Geri Stutz, president of Bendel, recalls “Diane marching into my office and plunking the postcard down on my desk. She was grinning like a happy little kid.”
Opening night of the show it seemed as if everybody she knew in the art and photography worlds was there, including Emile de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the Pop Art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull. At Pat Peterson’s suggestion, Diane wore a white silk dress. Actress/photographer Roz Kelly,* who was there, says “Diane looked like an angel in the midst of a huge crowd.” She never stopped floating. Eventually she came drifting over to Kelly. “I’d like to photograph you,” she murmured. After a few moments she melted away in another direction. And much later a museum photographer captured her materializing ghost like from around a wall. She can be seen observing her brother Howard talking with Allan and Mariclare Costello.
Shortly after the opening the Bob Meserveys got a postcard emblazoned with Diane’s portrait of the identical twins. The message read: “Get to the Museum of Modern Art… Everything here is overwhelming… I go from laughter to tears.”
“For a while, she thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened,” Garry Winogrand says. “The ‘New Documents’ show meant everything to her.” He adds that he doesn’t think the show itself was so important, although it did suggest some of the pure potential of photography. “But it was more important because it introduced Diane Arbus to the world.” And, indeed, the lion’s share of attention, praise, and criticism was reserved for her thirty portraits of midgets, transvestites, and nudists, which were set off in a room by themselves, whereas Winogrand’s paradoxical groupings of people and animals shared a space with Lee Friedlander’s reflections in windows.
Crowds poured into the Arbus room and jostled one another in an effort to get close to the portrait of the lolling family of nudists. Elderly couples averted their eyes and often left hurriedly, murmuring, “Disgusting!” The critic Peter Bunnell believes that “what disturbed and disoriented people most was the pictures’ power to dominate.” John Szarkowski thinks “Diane’s images reminded us that we could fail.”
“Diane Arbus is the wizard of odds!” one critic blared, and another stated, “She caters to the peeping Tom in all of us.” Chauncey Howell in Women’s Wear called her eye “Grotesque.” Robert Hughes in Time said, “Arbus is highly gratifying,” while the New York Times described the Arbus vision as “bizarre…and it must be added in some cases that the pictures are in bad taste.”
Some of the most enthusiastic viewers turned out to be hippies from Haight-Ashbury and East Village dropouts in beads and long hair. Diane’s images didn’t threaten them; they had already begun responding to paradox and ambiguity and recognized in the grimacing Arbus faces—the languid expressions of the drag queen—elements of their own rebellion and extremism.
Response from the photographic community was strangely muted. “It was like what happened when Bob Frank’s The Americans was published,” Saul Leiter says. “There wasn’t much overt excitement, but the residual effect was enormous.” The “New Documents” show reshaped the documentary photographers’ approach through the 1970s. And Diane’s work had a profound effect; her way of photographing in square format with direct flash was copied by hundreds of photographers.
However, Emile de Antonio recalls that most of the art world “at least on opening night” was its usual judgmental, carping self. He believes that Diane was dismissed except by a few discerning souls who recognized her singularity. “Her subject matter was just too difficult for most people to confront.” But her “Man in Hair Curlers” and “Woman with a Cigar” went on looking out at the crowds “unflinchingly,” Max Kosloff writes, “as if not to countenance but to challenge the prurience of the photographic act.”
The psychological complexity of experiencing the Arbus photographs was acutely analyzed by Marion Magid in Arts magazine: “One does not look with impunity as anyone knows who has ever looked at the sleeping face of a familiar person and discovered its strangeness. Once having looked [at Arbus’ work] and not looked away we are implicated. When we have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator a transaction takes place between the photograph and the viewer. In a kind of healing process we are cured of our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for looking. In the end the great humanity of Diane Arbus’s art is to sanctify that privacy which she seemed at first to have violated.”
Immediately after the show opened, Diane gave an in-depth interview to Ann Ray, a Newsweek reporter. While they walked around the exhibit one afternoon, stopping to consider the portraits of midgets and angry kids, Diane confessed, “It impresses me terribly to have a show at the Museum of Modern Art; the show looks wonderful. It’s beautifully hung…but I would never have done it except for John Szarkowski. He’s wonderful.” Then she added, “I’ve spent the last eight years—which is how long I’ve devoted full time to my photography—exploring—daring—doing things I’d never done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child—going to circuses… sideshows…” But when pressed, she seemed reluctant to discuss her subjects or their situations except in general terms.
Ray noted that “Diane Arbus prides herself on getting people to open up their secrets,” and so felt an obligation to keep those secrets to herself. “I work from awkwardness,” Diane said. “Whereas Dick Avedon works from grace. By that I mean if I stand in front of something instead of arranging it, I arrange myself…it’s important to take bad pictures—it’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before…sometimes looking into a camera frame is like looking into a kaleidoscope and you shake it and sometimes it won’t shake out… I’m not virtuous…I can’t do anything I want. In fact, I can’t seem to do anything that I want. Except be a spy. I’ve captured people who’ve since died and people who will never look that way again… I’m clever… I don’t mean I can match wits with people ‘cuz I can’t. But I can figure myself into any situation. I choose photography projects that are somehow Mata Harish. I’ll not risk my life but I’ll risk my reputation or my virtue—but I don’t have so much left,” and she laughed. “Everyone suffers from the limitation of being only one person.”
She paused in front of her portrait of identical twins from Roselle, New Jersey, which perhaps better than any other of her images expresses the crux of her vision—the freakishness in normalcy, the normalcy in freakishness. “I thought how ordinary is a charming pair of twins,” Diane murmured. “In some societies twins are taboo, an aberration.”
She paused again in front of her portrait of a peroxided, buxom burlesque comedienne seated in front of her cluttered dressing table. “She looks as if she’d stopped changing when burlesque
died,” Diane said. “With her Betty Grable hairdo and her platform shoes.”
Asked if she deliberately distorted, Diane answered, “The process of photography is itself a bit of a distortion…but I’m not interested in distortion…you have to fuss with what you want and what the camera wants…the camera is so cold. I try to be as good as I can to make things even…the poetry, the irony, the fantasy, it’s all built in.”
She seemed pleased when told that some people likened her photographs to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, particularly her portrait of “The Widow” in an apartment crammed with gewgaws and objets d’art. “I love Cornell’s secrets—all those little secrets in little boxes—and I adore Steinberg and Pinter’s Homecoming because the play has such secrets in his use of language.”
Almost every day Diane came to the museum and moved through her exhibit, eavesdropping on the public’s reaction. She maintained, “I love what people say…one woman looked at the pictures and said, ‘I’d sure like to see the photographer, Diane Arbus,’ implying that anyone who takes such weird pictures has got to be weird herself. Like the man and wife who came in and the husband said, ‘This is great. I feel as if I know all these people,’ and the wife said, ‘You do?’ ”
But eventually she got tired of listening—most of the comments were derogatory: “strange,” “ugly,” “hateful,” “distorted,” “repulsive…”
She was told by friends that she had to develop an inner toughness, an indifference to people’s negative opinions of her work—a belief that the opinions of others were of concern to them and not to her. John Putnam quoted Gertrude Stein’s admonishment to Picasso: “All original art is irritating at first before it becomes acceptable to the public.”
She grew increasingly depressed. She didn’t really enjoy all the recognition; she liked to think of herself as someone who worked in private. Now the public and the art world had declared a stake in her career, and in the future everything would be done on display.
While the “New Documents” show was at the museum, she let John Gossage photograph her in Central Park. In the picture Diane is bundled up in a black quilted coat and a white turtleneck sweater, her Miniaflex camera with flash hanging around her neck. She confronts the lens with a look of utter desolation. After the session Gossage asked her how she felt and she answered, “Photographing is not about being comfortable, either for the photographer or the subject.”
One weekend she escaped to East Hampton to stay with Tina Fredericks. “Even though the water was freezing cold, she swam far out in the ocean,” Tina says. Her depression would not go away. She complained of being “dry and flat.” Nobody understood her pictures, she said. She’d been afraid of that—that she would be known simply as “the photographer of freaks.” It upset her that her motives were being misread. She was no more voyeuristic than any other photographer, nor was she “sicker” or “weirder.” It was just that she was more open, more honest, about her fascination with what society labeled “perverted” or “forbidden.”
As far as she was concerned, she simply wanted to take pictures of people whose faces and stories interested her. By now she had a stack of looseleaf notebooks dating back to 1959 which were crammed with brief accounts of hundreds of lives—romances, crises, disasters, jotted down in her nearly indecipherable scrawl. Nobody was identified by complete name because these were the secrets her eccentrics and her ordinary people had entrusted her with while she photographed them. Their stories never failed to excite her. She was thrilled, not only by what they had to say, but also by what they drew out of her. Because once they began talking to each other and she started clicking her camera, the gulfs that divided them—gulfs of race, age, expectation, craziness even—momentarily disappeared.
Collecting and exchanging secrets was a private bond between herself and her subjects; it was actually at the core of her work. Making something a secret was a way of giving it value. Secrecy kindled mystery and a belief in the sacred and it encouraged the distinctions and the connections between the midget and the Jewish Giant’s doomed yearnings.
Like most imaginative photographers, Diane found the medium limited—so that her images were meaningless unless she had stories and secrets attached to them.
Her friend, the painter Richard Lindner, would confirm this. Lindner would say that creative people must deal in secrets—if your secrets disappear, you are nothing.
Both he and Diane were intrigued by the sexual role-changes that were occurring in the sixties. He thought men were the victims as well as the victimizers of women, that women were more imaginative than men because “they have secrets we don’t even know about,” and richer, more complicated interior lives. Diane appreciated that, given her intense involvement with self, her ability to live so freely with her restless body and caressing hands.
She and Lindner often discussed pornography. She had, in fact, begun to collect porn (both novels and photographs), and was mesmerized by the boring repetitiveness of it—the literalness, the minimal style. Whenever she went to the 42nd Street “live sex” shows, she was struck by how, although the expectation was for sensation, there was finally no sensation at all, no eroticism, no mystery up on the rickety stage. Strangely enough, erotic images seemed to hold little interest for Diane; their complicated, self-defining qualities were almost lost on her.
* Pat Peterson says that when the special fashion issue was published in May 1967, it was “quite controversial. We got a lot of negative mail because Diane’s images were so strong.”
Diane credited this first issue to the Arbus studio. But her next two issues of children’s fashion, done in 1969 and 1970, she credited to herself. (All three have since become collectors’ items.)
* Kelly (who later played the Fonz’s girl on TV) used to dress up in outrageous costumes and wigs and take kitschy self-portraits in an effort to “find” her true image. In 1968 Diane took a series of portraits of Kelly posing à la Marilyn Monroe. And Kelly took pictures of Diane staring out the window of the 42nd Street automat. She is holding onto her camera and flash. “(She looked as if she was on a cloud and about to take off,” Kelly said. “She took off alright [after that] I never saw her again.”)
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APRIL 15, 1967. EASTER SUNDAY “Be-In” in Central Park. A pungent smell of incense rose from the grass on the Sheep Meadow, mingled with the smoke of burning draft cards. Thousands of hippie kids in beads and body paint were tripping, stumbling, playing guitars, throwing balloons into the air, yanking off their clothes and rolling into the lake by Bethesda Fountain. Diane came to photograph the spectacle with Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah and Garry Winogrand, both of whom snapped shots of her looking guarded and chewing on a daffodil. “She hated having her picture taken,” Winogrand says.
Later that day she ran into John Putnam and complained that she wasn’t getting enough work. She’d expected “New Documents” to generate some really lucrative assignments, but not much had happened. A lot of phone calls, queries—a lot of talk from Life, but no definite offers—and when she went to Look to ask if they’d like her to photograph Death Row (something she’d always wanted to do), she was told it was too difficult to get permission. She hated peddling her pictures, her ideas, to magazines; it seemed degrading. She was now more afraid of going to Condé Nast than to a leather bar or a brothel.
She was still working regularly for Esquire and Bazaar, but the pay rate was terrible—$150 for a single black-and-white picture, $200 for a spread.
To dispel the growing myth that she only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph. She told someone she wanted to photograph beautiful people because “beauty is itself an aberration—a burden, a mystery…like babies. They can take the most remorseless scrutiny…”
As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture the infant resem
bles a flat white death’s head—eyes sealed shut, mouth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.
She was still phoning Joseph Mitchell. One of the last times they spoke, he says, “I suggested she photograph the Basque shepherds who come to New York once a year for a few days before going on their way to Wyoming to herd sheep. Most of their time was spent at the Jai Lai, a marvelous Basque restaurant that used to be on Bank Street. Diane wanted to photograph men out of their culture—here was an opportunity. Don’t know whether she did.”
Mitchell says that after seven years of phone conversations “we still hadn’t met. She once said, ‘You know, we should meet.’ And then I admitted I’d caught a glimpse of her recently in the East Village at the Dom—she’d been photographing and she’d been so involved I didn’t want to interrupt her…
“And there was a pause and she confided she’d seen me. At Costello’s Bar—I’d been sitting with Sid Perelman and she’d looked very hard at me but decided not to come over. So we never met. And if memory serves, May of 1967 was the last time I ever heard from her.”
As the weather grew warmer, there were more marches for and against the Vietnam war. Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael spoke to crowds in Sheep Meadow, and Diane, along with dozens of other photographers, would move through the masses of humanity with her flash. Afterward she might wander over to 57th Street and Fifth Avenue near Doubleday’s and position herself by the store until the sun set, photographing. And in the evenings she might go to Richard Avedon’s seminars, where Debbie Turbeville was showing her first monochromatic shots of slouching women trapped in ominous settings and Garry Winogrand talked about how he was planning to use his Guggenheim. From there she might head for the Dom, the biggest disco on the Lower East Side, which was always filled with the sound of rock music and strobe lights and movies projected against the walls; she would stay there documenting the couples dancing, preening, clowning for her cameras. These people were an essential part of what came to be known as the sixties subculture—druggies, transvestites, groupies, socialites, rich kids, all gathered together, performing for Diane’s cameras. Everybody at the Dom acted hungry for approval, for recognition, but it was all surface—immediate, noisy, tedious, scanned. The girls wore outrageous styles—like the “plural love/peace dress” which three could squeeze into at once (moving about the dance floor, they resembled a freaky six-legged animal). Then there were the boys in tight jeans and Sergeant Pepper jackets, little caps and granny glasses covering drugged, droopy eyes. Diane would quickly tire of such trivial self-revelation and end up at Max’s Kansas City to meet Marvin Israel and tell him about her day.
Diane Arbus Page 33