Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By ARTHUR LUBOW
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14
With a landmark museum show on Diane Arbus and the first glimpse
of her revealing letters, an image of the photographer as a deeply
empathetic artist is coming into focus.
iving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a
baby,'' Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him,
leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily. The
quip was funny, but a little off base. A camera for Arbus was like a
latchkey. With one around her neck, she could open almost any
door. Fearless, tenacious, vulnerable -- the combination conquered
resistance. In an eye-opening sequence in ''Revelations,'' the
compendious new book that is being published in tandem with a fullscale retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you
discover with a start the behind-the-scenes drama that produced her
famous photograph of ''A Naked Man Being a Woman.'' As her title
indicates, it is a portrait of a young man standing naked in his
apartment, genitals tucked out of sight, in a Venus-on-the-half-shell
pose. First she photographed him as a bouffant-haired young
matron on a park bench; then at home in a bra and half slip;
unwigged and unclothed a few moments later, with legs demurely
crossed; up posing for the prized shot; and finally, as a seemingly
ordinary fellow back on a park bench. Somehow, she had persuaded
him to take her home and expose a secret life. It's what she did
again and again. ''She got herself to go up to people on the street
and ask if she could photograph them,'' recalls her former husband,
Allan Arbus. ''One thing she often said was, 'I'm just practicing.''' He
chuckles. ''And indeed, I guess she was.''
During her lifetime, Arbus was lionized, but she was also lambasted
for being exploitative. Her suicide in 1971 seemed to corroborate the
caricature of her as a freaky ghoul. The critic Susan Sontag divined
that Arbus photographed ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well
as repulsive,'' from a vantage point ''based on distance, on privilege,
on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.''
Patricia Bosworth's biography in 1984 took the suicide as an
emblem of the life and told a lurid tale that is neatly summarized by
the tag line on the paperback edition: ''HER CAMERA WAS THE
WINDOW TO A TORTURED SOUL.'' In The New York Review of
Books, Jonathan Lieberson eviscerated Bosworth's book but also
deprecated Arbus's pictures as ''mannered, static snapshots'' that
were ''chaste, icy, stylized.'' Chaste, icy, stylized? Arbus's friend
Richard Avedon, maybe. Not Diane Arbus.
Doon Arbus was 26 when Diane died. As the older daughter of a
divorced mother, she took on the responsibility of managing the
estate. Her response to the critics was to clamp the spigot shut.
Arbus's letters, journals and diaries could not be examined. Anyone
wishing to reproduce Arbus photographs would have to submit the
book or article for Doon's vetting; any museum contemplating a
retrospective had to enlist her active collaboration. In almost all
cases, permission was denied. Unsurprisingly, critics and scholars
fumed. As Anthony W. Lee, the co-author of a new academic
treatise, ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums,'' puts it in an acid footnote,
''Those familiar with the writings on Arbus's photographs will
recognize a common thread that joins them all, which this essay
also shares: nearly all are published without the benefit of
reproductions of some of her most famous work.'' That work now
appeared in three handsome, meticulous monographs, which over
the last three decades Doon has compiled and released.
So it comes as a shock to see -- in the first full-scale museum
retrospective since 1972 and in the book -- that Diane Arbus at long
last is presented whole. Together with the pictures that have become
icons (the Jewish giant and his bewildered parents, the disturbingly
different identical twins, the in-process transvestite in hair curlers,
etc.), there are many of her photographs that have never been seen
(or even, in some cases, printed). Better still, there is a rich
assortment of extracts from her letters and journals that reveal her to
be a quirky, funny, first-rate writer, an extraordinarily loving mother
and an empathetic observer of her photographic subjects. More than
30 years after her death, a new portrait is emerging of one of the
most powerful American artists of the 20th century, in the style that
she favored. Uncropped.
Allan, who is now a trim and graceful white-haired man of 85, gave
Diane her first camera soon after they married in 1941. She was 18,
and they had met five years earlier, when he started working at
reward for this adventure.'' Today, when you shuffle through the
lifeless photos by imitators in the Arbus idiom, you are reminded of
how much time Arbus spent with so many of her subjects and of how
fascinated she was by their lives. She invested the energy in them
that a painter like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon would devote to
repeated portrait sittings; but unlike Freud or Bacon, who chose their
intimates as their subjects, Arbus picked strangers and, through her
infectious empathy, was able to transform these subjects into
intimates. ''She was an emissary from the world of feeling,'' says the
photographer Joel Meyerowitz. ''People opened up to her in an
emotional way, and they yielded their mystery.'' Without
sentimentalizing them or ignoring their failings, she liked and
admired her freaks. She first met Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant,
almost a decade before she took her extraordinary photograph of
him with his parents. You feel that had she never gotten the picture,
Arbus still would have considered the time with Carmel well spent.
Robert Brown, a neighbor and friend who often breakfasted with the
Arbuses when they lived on East 72nd, recalls a Sunday morning,
probably in 1957, when Allan showed Diane a newspaper item that
he knew would interest her: the circus was coming to town. The
troupe would be debarking from a train early the next morning and
parading to Madison Square Garden. ''Let's go!'' Diane said. Allan
was too busy, but Brown, who is an actor, accompanied her to the
parade and then drove her to Madison Square Garden. Coming to
pick her up three hours later, Brown asked the backstage doorman
where she was. ''Oh, the photographer?'' the man answered. ''She
never got very far.'' He pointed. She was sitting on the floor with the
midgets. ''I don't think she was snapping,'' Brown says. ''She was
getting involved.''
Arbus trawled the city, getting deeply involved with the people who
caught her eye: the sideshow performers at Hubert's Dime Museum
and Flea Circus, the cross-dressers at Club 82, the moonstruck
visionaries with handmade helmets and crackpot theories, the
magicians and fortunetellers and self-proclaimed prophets. But she
also pursued more ''ordinary'' types -- the swimmers at Coney
Island, the strollers down Fifth Avenue, the people on benches in
Central Park. At first, she was shy about getting too close.
Sometimes she would catch her quarry unawares, from a distance,
and then crop the image to give a close-up effect. But she wasn't
happy doing that. ''We were very against cropping,'' Allan says. She
Because Arbus took her own life, many people assume that she was
constantly grim. Actually, she was an enthusiastic woman with a
highly honed sense of the absurd, who was afflicted by blasts of
bleakness. ''She was a very lively person,'' Szarkowski says. ''She
had a very vivacious mind. She was never a depressed person in
my presence.'' Allan Arbus, who knew her as well as anyone did,
saw a fuller picture. ''I was intensely aware of these violent changes
of mood,'' he says. ''There were times when it was just awful, and
there were times. . . . '' His expression mimics fizzy exhilaration.
Diane preferred receiving confidences to giving them, one reason
photography was her natural medium. ''She wanted to contend with
something else, not express herself,'' Doon says.
The relationship with Israel was painful for Arbus. Married to Margie
Ponce Israel, a brilliant but emotionally troubled artist, he was not as
reliably available or emotionally supportive as Arbus wished. ''Diane
made no secret of the fact that she was waiting and waiting for
Marvin's attention,'' says Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the show
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who has gone through
Arbus's journals, letters and date books. Arbus did not talk to most of
her friends about Israel. Unusually, the artist Mary Frank knew them
both independently. ''A desire to be cared for is a very human
instinct,'' Frank says. ''Marvin could not have given Diane that
feeling. He was a very complicated person, and interested in his
own powers. He was capable of kindness, but then there was this
explosive aspect.'' Frank says that she saw Arbus despondent a
couple of times, and ''it definitely had to do with Marvin.'' Where
Allan gave Diane technical advice and emotional bolstering, Israel
excited her to take on new projects and challenges. ''He was always
interested in artists pushing as hard as they could toward their own
obsessions or perversities,'' says the writer Lawrence Shainberg,
who was a close friend.
Like Arbus, Israel loved to explore the seamier precincts of New
York. They didn't have to go far. Forty-Second Street was very
different then: ''everyone winking and nudging and raising their
eyebrows and running their hands through their marcelled hair and I
saw one of your seeing blind men and a man like you have told me
about with the pale ruined face-that-isn't-there and a thousand lone
conspirators,'' Arbus wrote Israel. Some of those trophies appeared
publicly when she agreed with much trepidation to be included,
along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, in an exhibition,