“I felt Diane was into absolutes,” Ti Grace says. “And she wasn’t particularly introspective. She kept a distance not just from me but from herself. And she didn’t want to get into the conflict between being creative and free and traditional female role-playing. She couldn’t understand my choice of living alone, without a man. To her, to be a woman living without a man was to be something of a failure.”
For the rest of the weekend Diane shot rolls and rolls of color film on Ti Grace Atkinson for the prospective Newsweek cover. “It was absolutely exhausting. We’d photograph for hours, then go out for a snack, then come back and start photographing again. Every so often we’d take a break, lie on the twin beds, and talk—very intensely. Diane complained about constantly scrounging for jobs and having to do fashion stuff, interrupting her own projects, which she hated doing.”
By the end of the weekend Diane was unsatisfied—she felt that none of the hundreds of pictures she’d taken was in any way revealing. “We both wanted a picture of me as Everywoman,” Ti Grace says. “We kept trying to get the right light. I have very pale skin and Diane was afraid I’d look too washed out. I suggested going into the bathroom—the white tiles…water. I thought if I got into a tub, the water would reflect the light…nothing like being naked in a warm bath to get you relaxed. We both got very excited—because it was risky. Diane was click-clicking away. ‘Nothing shows, does it?’ I kept asking. ‘Nothing shows. It’s just a head shot,’ Diane assured me. It was okay, she said. I thought she knew exactly what she was doing.”
When they got back to New York, Diane delivered all her film to Newsweek to be processed. Weeks went by and she heard nothing. Ti Grace knew the Women’s Liberation story was about ready for publication, so she phoned the art department and demanded to know why there had been no reaction to the pictures. Aren’t they going to be used? she asked. There was a silence and then one of the art directors murmured that he wasn’t quite sure what kind of political statement Diane Arbus was trying to make, and no, they weren’t going to use the pictures; an illustration would be used for the cover instead.
Ti Grace asked Newsweek to send the color pictures to her, which was done. Then she phoned Diane to hop a cab to her apartment on Park Avenue. For the next few hours they pored over the pictures—including dozens of beautiful frontal nudes of Ti Grace Atkinson smiling up from the clear, rippling water, and “everything was showing,” Ti Grace says. “And Diane acted flabbergasted—shocked. I guess it would have been pretty revolutionary to use one of those pictures for a cover of Newsweek. But they are absolutely gorgeous pictures.”
Newsweek did pay Diane well for her work, and in the article itself they used her head shot of Ti Grace lecturing to a group of women.
Ti Grace did not see Diane after that; she became intrigued with Joe Columbo, the Mafia boss, and the two of them joined forces—she to support the Italian American Civil Rights League, he to help women (he took to wearing a FREE A FEMINIST button in his lapel). Periodically, though, Ti Grace would have long conversations with Diane on the phone. “She seemed to be drowning. She kept telling me, ‘Here I am recognized as an artist, but I can’t make a living as a photographer.’ ”
Although it was easier now to get work exhibited in galleries (which didn’t pay until the prints were sold), it appeared to Diane that the better she became as a photographer, the more well known, the fewer magazine assignments she got. And there seemed to be no more grants available to her.
It was particularly frustrating because by 1970—liberated by the Pill, feminism, and federal funding—women artists in general were starting to be self-supporting. And, not so coincidentally, their creations—such as Eva Hesse’s rope-and-cloth hangings, Nancy Grossman’s powerful leather heads, and the androgynous sculptures of Mary Frank—were full of self-revelation.
But Diane had chosen a different route. In a era of self-revelation her work was detached and impenetrable; she refused to be lumped together with Frank and Grossman (much as she liked and respected them) as a “woman artist.” “I’m a photographer,” she insisted, although, paradoxically, she was the only woman to achieve status in what had been an all-male photography clique (its members included Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson). This meant, of course, that she would have to go it alone. Her femaleness just complicated the issue, raised the stakes. She had less room in which to maneuver (and she didn’t know how to play power games anyway) and fewer alternatives to fall back on. And no desire to make films like Frank, or teach like Winogrand, or get into industrial photography, which Bruce Davidson was starting to do and which was the most lucrative of all, apart from advertising.
Eventually John Szarkowski paid Diane a fee to help edit a show of newspaper photographs he was planning to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “Iconography of the Daily News.” For the next six months—until July 1970—she went to the Daily News three days a week and worked with Eugene Ferrara, who headed the photo department there. “Diane began with the file of pictures starting with Beverly Aadland and she got through G… She rarely spoke to me—always wore the same outfit: denim skirt, shirt, and jacket. And she always ate at the Automat by herself.”
This study of news photography was an extension of her interest in the snapshot as art—as a revelation, a recapitulation, a paradox. To Peter Crookston she wrote that editing the pictures was “funny to do. Some of the things are glorious. Yesterday I found a picture of a lady looking lathered as if for a shave sitting cloaked in white between a doctor and a nurse. All For Beauty’s Sake, it is called… Harriet Heckman submits to plastic surgery by Dr. Nathan Smilie of Phila. as nurse assists. (5/21/35) Miss Heckman has asked for the perfect face and perfect figure and announces she is perfectly willing to face death to attain them. ‘I want to do something about a body and face that have made me miserable,’ she says.”
By 1970, although she didn’t often speak of it, Diane had decided to go beyond photographing ordinary people trying to project different images to the world (like her portrait of the middle-aged woman dressed like a teen-ager). Now she was concentrating on photographing retardates—middle-aged retardates at a home in Vineland, New Jersey. She was fascinated by their “extreme innocence,” their total lack of self-consciousness. They paid no attention to her when she was photographing them. In front of her cameras they behaved like bizarre, overgrown kids, and their actions were unpredictable—they were either hyperactive or terribly slowed down. They would often make noises—eerie gurglings, yelps, squeals—while they frolicked clumsily on the grass. Their complete absorption in what they were doing—whether it was trying on funny hats or pulling at each other’s hair—delighted and moved her. She went back to photograph them again and again.
She had gone on changing cameras—in order to change her images. As usual, she asked Avedon for advice. Hiro, who was still sharing Avedon’s studio, said he’d started using a Pentax—he loved the way it worked. And he didn’t use a flash. Diane borrowed it from him and used it for a couple of weeks at Vineland. She was so pleased with the results that in gratitude she gave Hiro a rubber tree which he still has in his new studio on Central Park West. “A lot of people got cuttings from my rubber tree when they found out it was from Diane,” Hiro says. “I bet maybe now there are a dozen Diane Arbus rubber trees around New York.”
In July she went to Minneapolis to attend the opening of Avedon’s exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show—spectacularly designed by Marvin Israel—displayed over 260 photographs, twenty-five years’ worth of the finest examples of Avedon’s exploration of portraiture. With this exhibit Avedon hoped at last to be critically “considered” as a photographer. Unfortunately, the New York Times photo critic, Gene Thornton, spent most of his review writing about the several nude portraits Avedon had taken of Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky. “I had to read this review about my life’s work and it was all about one picture,” Avedon told Connie Goldman of Na
tional Public Radio. “He had a hang-up about this one picture—it’s as if all the others weren’t even there. I was devastated…really thrown back. No artist is strong enough to stand that.” (Avedon went on to be acclaimed—for the most part—for exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, the Marlborough Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum, and he would later say to hell with the critics—the artist works from the inside, not the outside, and reviews, no matter how praising, never really enrich his work.)
Diane, who had observed not only the hectic last-minute preparations for the Minneapolis show but had heard the enthusiastic response as well, was very proud of and impressed by Marvin Israel’s creative involvement—his vision had fused with Avedon’s. During the press preview she and T. Hartwell, the photograph curator, went off into a corner to discuss the visual impact of the exhibit and he brought up the possibility of the institute doing a companion show of her work. “I told her I thought Marvin could style and structure a show that could work just as dramatically for her pictures. And she agreed. She seemed very enthusiastic.”
But when she wrote to Peter Crookston, she said nothing about a possible show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Instead, she told him about the hotel she had stayed at in Minneapolis, which had “a glass dome and a swimming pool next to her room.” She sounded so pleased that Marvin had invited her—he’d been so nice. She phoned Tina Fredericks to tell her that, and Chris von Wangenheim, and a great many other people.
Diane still dreamed of getting a Pentax camera of her own. Hiro told her he could obtain one for her for the wholesale price of $1000, but she didn’t have $1000. Impulsively, she decided to teach a master class in photography at Westbeth and charge $50 a student; if she could collect twenty students, she could buy the camera. She asked Neil Selkirk, a young English photographer who was then Hiro’s assistant, what he thought of the idea. He said he’d sign up in a second. So did one of Avedon’s assistants. This gave her the impetus she needed, and after she put an ad in the Times, twenty-eight more students applied. She thought she should keep the class small, but she didn’t have the heart to turn down any of the applicants, although the work of some didn’t particularly interest her.
By this time Diane had become a legend among young photographers. She had just won the Robert Levitt Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers “for outstanding achievement.” In her acceptance speech she told the audience, “I am still collecting things—the ones I recognize and the ones I can’t quite believe.” “She was already a myth,” her friend Susan Brockman said. “A lot of people related to her that way. She was a very literary character, very classical, which was unusual in this time.” Everyone who attended her course (or “the last class,” as it was later called) had seen her work at the Museum of Modern Art. “You couldn’t forget those startling pictures,” one of her students, Mark Haven, says. “There was such intense collaboration between photographer and subject.” And the “freaks” and “normals” were both captured in such an unjudgmental, uniform style—their faces took on a rich strangeness. In almost every shot a ghostly emotion seems to rise from Diane’s images. “Diane’s pictures appealed to the mind, not the eye,” Jerry Ulesmann says, “which is one of the reasons she broke new ground for photographers. Diane explored the psychological.”
As soon as her class was set and scheduled to meet in a vacant Westbeth apartment, Diane grew terrified. What could anybody learn from her? What would she say? She never stopped doubting herself, asking, “What on earth can they get from me?” At the last minute she asked Marvin Israel to sit in on the class, as well as a fashion model she was fond of, and a filmmaker she liked, Susan Brockman. Suddenly she wanted to have friends hanging around—their joint presence would be comforting to her. But once the classes got under way, she seemed to forget her fears. At first there was some resentment because she had accepted too many students. “The room was overcrowded,” Mary Ellen Andrews, a student, recalls. “We thought we wouldn’t get enough individual attention.” (Deborah Turbeville, in fact, demanded her money back, but Diane wouldn’t give it to her.) However, the resentment quickly simmered down. At the first class Diane announced, “Nobody is going to love your pictures like yourself.” “That was terrific for me,” Susan Brockman said. “It was what she wanted you [to feel] in terms of your own work. It hit me like a ton of bricks; really opened me up.” And Anne Tucker says, “The class was not simply about photography. It was about people and relating to people and eliciting a genuine response.”
Suzanne Mantell, another student, remembers how “Arbus asked us to bring in examples of our favorite things and explain why they were our favorites. Someone brought in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. I brought in a spatula—you know, the kind that flips over pancakes? And Diane brought in her collection of favorite cut-outs and rip-outs, images torn from every conceivable magazine and newspaper.” “It was very significant,” Neil Selkirk says. “It seemed to be saying you don’t have to be an artist to produce something that moves people.”
Another assignment was to describe an experience you couldn’t photograph. “Diane wanted us to tell her our stories,” Anne Tucker says. “She would get angry if we weren’t specific. She kept insisting, ‘Tell exactly what happened. Where were you when that happened?’ ”
Ikko Narahara, a young Japanese photographer who taped all of the Arbus classes, described the time he’d been in Holland trying to photograph a crane in flight. When he found a crane perched in a nest on a rooftop, he set up his cameras very carefully and then waited all day for the propitious moment. Finally the crane flapped her wings—and shit on the roof. Diane loved that story.
Anne Tucker described her father’s funeral. “I was walking up the aisle of the church behind my father’s coffin. And suddenly someone in a pew whispered, ‘She doesn’t have any gloves on,’ and I looked down at my hands. It was a totally visual moment. Diane repeated that anecdote several times.”
Another assignment was to photograph something or somebody you’ve never photographed before—or are in awe of, or afraid of. Eva Rubinstein asked Diane if she could photograph her. “Diane was a little taken aback, but she agreed. She insisted, however, that I do it at the ungodly hour of eight a.m. I said okay, although it would be hard for me; I tend to be a late riser. It was pouring rain that morning—the morning I arrived at Westbeth. Diane was ready for me, dressed in those funny, low-slung, black leather pants and black top she often wore. She seemed harried, but then she always seemed harried to me. She said she had an appointment at the dentist, so be quick about it. Her daughter Amy was there, too. She had just washed her hair and she was sitting on the bed with her head wrapped in a bright red towel. She watched us without speaking. Nearby, on the wall, there were strange pictures tacked up—of penises sticking out of belly buttons—kinky, strange stuff. I began setting up my tripod (I used a Rollei 66), and as I did, I noticed Diane sidle over to the mirror and begin to primp—fix her hair. I thought, ‘What a reversal! Diane Arbus trying to make herself look as good as possible before she’s photographed.’ And, of course, she knew how to pose after all those years of shooting fashion models—she struck exactly the right angle, and she was poised and cool. The session didn’t take very long. Coincidentally, that afternoon I photographed Robert Frank—I’d been waiting months to do that. The following week I brought Diane’s portrait in to class, but I could tell she didn’t like it that much.” (Rubinstein excels in austere, elegant still-lifes containing sumptuous light.) “The only other comment she made about my work was about another portrait—one of my best, a portrait of the dying Violet Trefusis [Vita Sackville-West’s lover] which I’d taken in her bedroom in Florence. Diane remarked, ‘The subject is better than the photograph!’ I took that to mean that if she’d taken the picture, it would have been a better picture. Diane’s childlikeness surprised me. She could giggle like a teen-ager one minute, then turn somber and exhausted the next. Once she commented to several of us in class, out of the blue,
‘I was born way up the ladder of middle-class respectability and I’ve been clambering down as fast as I could ever since.’ ”
During class Diane would sit cross-legged on the floor, passing nuts and dried fruits for everybody to munch on. She kept saying, “You’ve got to learn not to be careful.” She talked about how taking a portrait is like seducing someone. She talked about how she used everything she had to obtain a photograph—from “acting dumb” to dropping things, distracting her subjects so they’d feel less threatened. “Most people like having their picture taken,” she said. “They like being paid attention to.”
Somebody asked her, “Do you think your pictures are cruel?” And she answered, “No, these people wanted to have their pictures taken—agreed to have their pictures taken.” She added that she would never take a picture of somebody who didn’t want it, and she said that she had passed up possible photographs because she couldn’t ask the subject to pose without hurting or embarrassing him. There was a man she saw one night, riding on the subway. She said his entire face was covered with warts and she wanted to take his picture, but she couldn’t without making him feel even more self-conscious than he already was.
She always answered the students’ questions very directly, although she hated being pinned down. (When Diana Edkins, Condé Nast photo-researcher, tried to interview her, Diane said, “Okay—let’s do it right now, but I warn you, I may disagree with what I say now tomorrow.”) But she loved to talk, and to these classes she talked and talked and talked. And Suzanne Mantell, Anne Tucker, Mary Ellen Andrews, and others took notes on some of the things she said.
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