During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.
I happened to come across a French edition of the photographs while I was reading Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 and they didn’t look the same. Arbus writes in A Chronology of the gossamer quality of the light in these images, which were taken mostly outdoors at sunset, and the photographs now seemed suffused with the deepest tenderness. It’s as if Arbus is photographing the soft underside of the human psyche — the pre-rational child that can scarcely navigate. It isn’t a pretty picture except that it looked now like only another natural part of the whole operating system of reality, including the light in which she finds it.
Editor’s Note: That was the opening of Aram Saroyan’s First review of a compelling, diaristic collection of Arbus’s writing published in 2011. Saroyan’s meditation on Arbus’s work seems right on time again in the wake of the current show of her photographs at the Met and William Todd Schultz’s new biography, An Emergency in Slow Motion, which suggests, among other discomfiting disclosures, that Arbus had sex with her brother, poet Howard Nemerov. The rest of Saroyan’s piece on Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 is posted below…
Richard Avedon was Arbus’s closest colleague, and the art director and painter Marvin Israel perhaps her closest lifelong friend. These three, almost exact contemporaries — Israel was born in 1924, a year after Avedon and Arbus — shared a Jewish upper-middle-class upbringing: Arbus’s family, the Nemerovs, owned Russeks department store; her older brother was the poet Howard Nemerov. In 1960, she wrote in a postcard to Israel:
…Our bourgeois heritage seems to me glorious as any stigma, especially to see it reflected back and forth in the mirror of each other. It is magic, and magic chooses any guise and ours is just perhaps more hilarious than to have been Negro or midget. It always makes me laugh in the middle of some unbelievable instant to think how our parents would approve each other. That is the joke we are on them and us and it. To be so Jewish and rich and middle class and from good families and to run so variously away from it that we come full circle and bump into each other. Like they say in the comics *?!!#$? Boinggg….
At eighteen she married a young man working for her family at Russeks, Allan Arbus. Over a summer holiday he took photographs of her modeling some of the store’s new clothing line, and the two ended up with the store’s fashion photography account. Over the next decade they did fashion assignments together for most of the top magazines of the day, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Allan handled the technical side of these assignments, including taking the photographs, while Diane worked on the sets and make-up — as she later thought of it, “a glorified stylist.”
But while her husband became technically adept, Arbus was the more deeply engaged by the medium. She attended classes taught by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director at Harper’s Bazaar, a legendary teacher and Avedon’s mentor. “Make it new,” was Brodovitch’s imperative to his students, echoing Ezra Pound’s earlier one to poets. But Arbus was almost alone in not being inspired by this approach. It was the photographer Lisette Model, also a teacher, who said to her: “Originality means coming from the source, not like Brodovitch — at any price to do it different.” According to Allan, Model catalyzed “an absolutely magical breakthrough. [Diane] felt totally freed and able to photograph.”
While Avedon’s enormous social energy infused both his life and his photographs and quickly made him a preeminent fashion and portrait photographer, Arbus was drawn to a world that usually escaped notice. The cliché that she photographed freaks and/or human marginalia is belied by the broad range of her subjects. “I want to photograph everybody,” she wrote.
She and Avedon were born in America only six years before Anne Frank was born in Germany, and most likely would have perished if they’d exchanged countries of origin with Frank. It seems possible that both photographers in different ways but with comparable energy were engaged in visually cataloguing, perhaps “domesticating,” a world that had recently attempted to eliminate them. Avedon gathered up that world’s grand eminences while Arbus sought out and often befriended its overlooked, who at the same time were often among its most irrevocable identities: the Jewish giant and his parents, for example. The fame each quickly achieved — Avedon a decade before Arbus because he found his vocation that much earlier — was, in turn, a kind of fast-forward assimilation.
A Chronology is made up primarily of excerpts from Arbus’s own writing in journals, diaries and letters. Framed and supported by a spare narrative written by the curator Elizabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, the older of Arbus’s two daughters and director of her estate, the photographer’s words are also supplemented by excerpts from interviews with others, perhaps the most telling of which is with John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who was among the first to recognize the importance of her work. He reports his first reaction to a portfolio she sent to him:
There was one that I loved of the man and woman arguing on the walk at Coney Island. [You] really felt somebody who was just enormously ambitious, really ambitious. Not in any cheap way. In the most serious way. Someone who was going to stand for no minor successes. And that feeling colored all our relationship because if you feel that, it automatically sets up a kind of distance that you’ve got to respect no matter how well you may come to know each other. There’s something untouchable about that kind of ambition. You can’t manhandle it…I think she wanted every word she said, every picture she took, everything she did, I think she wanted it to be just perfect — for some great revelation to come through. Terrifying.
When Szarkowski includes Arbus photographs with work by Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand in his benchmark 1967 New Documents show at MOMA, the museum director Rene d’Harnoncourt, while behaving with old-world politesse, lobbies him to display the Arbus photographs in a separate alcove. “He knew that I knew what he was trying to say,” Szarkowski continues, “—‘segregate the transvestites in a nook of their own.’” While the curator was adamant against it “You can’t divide these people up according to your private standard of morality” — d’Harnoncourt would “pretend he was persuaded and then he’d go at it again in some other round-about Viennese way. So finally I said, ‘Look, Diane is coming in and why don’t the two of you get together.’”
The irresistible force meets the immovable object less than a week before the opening. Szarkowski continues:
[Rene] was about six feet eight, this mountain of a man with a Viennese ceremony every bit as formidable as Diane’s was…They met here in the office and it was one of the best confrontations I ever saw. I stood in the corner, smiling, and watched them. Absolutely polite. Absolutely gracious on both sides. Absolutely smiling. Both of them really understood and respected each other but finally Rene with great graciousness just gave up and bowed and retreated from the field.
The jacket copy of A Chronology notes: “Arbus’s originality and eloquence as a writer may rival her gifts as a photograher” — a claim that ceases to be implausible only a little way into the book, which is studded with jewel-like vignettes, including these three from 1960 letters to Marvin Israel:
Yesterday I went all wet and bedraggled to the preliminaries of the miss america contest where they were choosing miss new york city. The categories of judging were 1. personality in a bathing suit. 2. personality in an evening gown and 3. talent which counted double what the other two categories counted…It took about ten hours of interviews, sashaying and performing what they called their talent and the poor girls looked so exhausted by the effort to be themselves that they continually made the fatal mistakes which were in fact themselves…Our only hope for judgment day is that god judges us for personality in an evening gown while we are in a bathing suit…
xxx
Last night I went to a church dance on henry street for neighborhood kids some of whom are gang kids. It was terribly dark, marvelous dancing, very natty guys, everybody negro except about 4 people including me and the priests who wore their full regalia and looked very splendid sweeping through and among the dancers like cats watching mosquitoes…
xxx
Friday night…I went into a Child’s — I mean the restaurant…and at a near table there was a couple and the woman was an incredible spastic, very plain and pale and middleaged like lillian gish, like an out of order mechanical doll. She was eating her custard when I came in and dancing while she was eating it, seven motions for every once the spoon got to her mouth. The man was very tall and thin, graceful fatherly agile cheerful, affable, talkative, when they got up he held her coat for her to dance into and her face didn’t ever change, she looked terribly plain and dazzled, like someone seeing visions, and after she got into her coat he bent over like a tree and kissed her.
She is now an independent working professional, proposing and receiving assignments from Esquire and the London Times Sunday Magazine, to name two of her frequent venues. Sharing parental duties while raising their daughters, she and Allan remained close though they had begun living apart and eventually divorced. (Allan Arbus, who took up acting, remarried and moved to Los Angeles, is perhaps best known for his recurring role as the psychiatrist in the television series M*A*S*H.)
By the time of the New Documents show, Arbus was recognized as an important photographer both by editors and museum curators, and had received a Guggenheim, but still struggled financially. Late in her life she decided to put together a small limited edition of prints of her work but had only sold a few at the time of her death, two of them to Avedon.
There is little here that predicts her suicide, albeit an occasional note about an exhilaration she feels and the conscious effort to channel it into work. In our new day of digital cameras and prints, one reads of the rigorous schedule she tries to meet in completing the prints for her boxed sets. There is a note in the text that she attended, participated in and photographed orgies but wasn’t happy with the pictures. She was seeing a psychiatrist and today would very likely have been taking a prescribed medication.
By the time of her death, her daughters were out of the nest, Doon working for Avedon and Amy, who would become a photographer, a college student. She writes to Allan with pride about Amy:
She is so freewheeling but practical and she has developed so many means of being self-determining and has access to this vast network of her generation, so that she literally doesn’t feel alone in an alien world the way we always have.
Empty nest syndrome, loneliness, the Jewish “stigma,” the profound social earthquake of the 1960s — perhaps all of these had a part in her decision on a late July weekend in 1971 in Manhattan to take her life. Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe would now begin to make their mark. And while they too walked on the wild side, and surely found precedent for it in Arbus’s work, the hallmark they all share seems more to have to do with the tenderness implicit in the attention they would pay to any subject. In post World War II New York, with America now the free world super-power, Arbus was among the first wave of artists to embody in her work what was to come: the paradigm shift from the hierarchical to the communal.