DIANE ARBUS is one of the great American photographers of the 20th century, and would have done much more if she hadn’t died young. Using a 35-millimeter Nikon camera, and later a Rolleiflex, she made photos which are perceptive, disturbing and beautiful. Plenty of detractors find her work freakish and exploitative. But the images stand: a Jewish giant, hunched in the living room of his diminutive parents; a pair of identical twin girls, in matching clothes and haircuts; a grimacing boy clutching toy hand grenades in Central Park. They are icons of 20th century photography, and deservedly so.
Harold Hayes was editor of Esquire magazine in 1959 when he decided to devote an entire issue of Esquire to what was happening in New York City. He asked Arbus to walk around New York and take some pictures he might use in that issue. Hayes was astonished at the originality, bravery and power of the images this soft-voiced woman brought back. Later, he felt he should have used only Diane’s images to illustrate that issue, but at the time it struck him as a little dangerous. The photos seemed an indictment of a city of which he was very fond.
She was born as Diane Nemerov in 1923, into a wealthy New York Jewish family who owned and ran the Fifth Avenue department store Russek’s. The Russeks were her mother’s family. The Nemerovs were comparatively poor and obscure. Diane’s father David rose high at Russek’s but was overshadowed by his wife and her family. He was a compulsive smiler, a flamboyant man who made affectionate gestures to his children but had no time for them. Instead of love, he gave, and withdrew, his approval.
Diane’s mother Gertrude suffered from depression, and worried that it might turn up in her daughter. Even as a baby, Diane seemed to ponder the day’s events long and carefully. As a teenager, she stood for many minutes at a time on a window ledge 12 stories above Central Park West, gazing out at distant buildings and trees. “What are you looking at?” Gertrude would ask, and pull her daughter back into the apartment.
Diane’s older brother, Howard, grew up to be a distinguished poet. Diane’s younger sister, Renee, became a sculptor and designer. Howard’s skill as a poet was evident early, and Diane used to complain that she would be known to posterity only as Howard Nemerov’s sister.
Gertrude chain-smoked, played bridge in the apartment and had a narrow, cautious sense of wealth and glamour. Diane once said: “The family fortune always seemed to me humiliating. It was like being a princess in some loathsome movie” set in “some kind of Transylvanian obscure Middle Eastern country.” Gertrude tried at all times to be completely respectable. She was supremely conscious of how her every action might look to her friends and associates, and to other “important” people in New York. She filled her apartment with reproductions of expensive French furniture — in slipcovers. Her children were trailed by maids and governesses. When Diane played in the sand box, she had to wear white gloves.
At 10 or 12, Diane expressed complex, erudite thoughts in a little girl’s voice. With her strange calm and lovely green eyes, she was often unsettling to conventional people. She drew quirky people to her side.
Gertrude and David Nemerov believed photographs were trivial as works of art, important only as advertisements of the family. No matter what horrors might be occurring, when it was time for a family photograph, they felt everyone must smile for the camera. Tensions within the family might be extreme at times, but the outside world should never have any sense of that.
When something awkward or grotesque appeared, even if it was right in front of them, Gertrude would order her daughter ‘Don’t look.’ Part of the way that Gertrude Nemerov measured style and class was by a person’s imperviousness to the unsettling, by the steadfastness of their refusal to be drawn into the freakish.
Diane Arbus had a totally contrary vibe. Money and social position annoyed her. Caution was a drag. Supervision was a kind of theft. Surprising other people, or at least opening their eyes to the offbeat, was almost the point of life, at least of an artist’s life. At 14, Diane fell in love with a 19-year-old actor and artist, Allan Arbus. As soon as she turned 18, she married him. She was dying to get away from her parents, to live openly, spontaneously, without worrying.
She studied photography with Lisette Model at The New School, and was fascinated by the peculiar power of this art form. Like Diane, Model had grown up in a rich family, both cosseted and neglected. She believed that artists should call attention to the extremes of society. Model gave Diane confidence in her photography and pushed her toward snapping pictures of people on the margins.
Diane once said “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” She often made the people she was photographing feel part of a joint conspiracy.
For the decade from 1946–1956, Diane and Allan worked together in a small but successful commercial photography firm. They had a studio at 319 East 72nd Street, and took photos for ads that appeared in magazines like Glamour, Seventeen and Vogue. They balanced each other well, Allan quick, well-organized and practical, and Diane, slower and deeper.
They had two daughters, Doon in 1945 and Amy nine years later.
Diane and Allan loved and admired each other but Allan was drained by Diane’s severe mood swings, and Diane tired of his criticism. Diane quit their business in 1956, and they separated in 1959. They were still fond of each other a decade later, when they divorced.
Diane became a friend and lover of the painter Marvin Israel, who praised her photography and was pleased by her obsessions, which he promised would guide her work, show her the way.
Diane wanted to record the world in photographs without asking permission. She photographed wax museums, dance halls, flophouses — endlessly curious about how people live. She snapped pictures of midgets and misfits; beauty contestants at nudist camps; giants; circus performers; Nazis; transvestites; drag queens; street people; and the mentally challenged.
Once, after a romantic crisis, she and a dear friend met in a steam bath and were pouring out their hearts to one another when suddenly Diane felt inspired by the near-naked women in the steam bath and began snapping pictures of them. Women being photographed without their permission glared and made angry noises and, when Diane refused to stop taking pictures, someone snatched her camera and threw it in a bucket of water. The management evicted Diane and her friend from the premises. Out on the street, the two women laughed uproariously.
Richard Avedon was perhaps the photographer who best understood Diane. Like her, Avedon was from a Jewish family grown wealthy through the founding of a department store. Both Richard and Diane felt that their parents were powerful without being impressive, that there was a fake glamour around them, with which family photographs had always been complicit. Both vowed that their own photos would be far more honest.
In 1969, Diane made a wonderful photo portrait of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. He stands in Central Park, in a pose both formal and tender, his eyes and necktie slightly askew, his thick fingers resting comfortably on the handle of his cane.
She photographed carnival performers, and if some critics and photography fans find Diane’s pictures repellent, much of the critique comes around the idea that to her it was all a carnival show — she’d take someone’s nudity or their mental challenges and hold it up and exploit it to give the viewer a weird little thrill. To some, she is a voyeur, who delights in making voyeurs of us all.
But there are devotees of Diane Arbus who find her efforts to honor and record the marginalized both ethically inspiring and artistically remarkable. Hilton Als has said that Diane’s photos of the marginalized have a “nonjudgmental, trusting calm.” Fans of her work find an empathy rare in portraiture.
She once said this about freaks in a public lecture: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” She felt they had an engaged, courageous mind, and a noble spirit. Joseph Mitchell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, had a parallel interest in freaks. He warned Diane that she should distinguish between born freaks and those MADE freakish by the bigotry of our society.
When people confessed to her that they found her photos sad, Diane might reply that what she found sad were the masks that people wore, hiding their true selves. She loved to photograph children because they had not yet learned to wear those masks. She was fascinated by the blind and said “They don’t know what their expressions are, so there is no mask.”
There is no question that Diane was doing more than documenting what she saw. She learned that using a flashbulb in broad daylight slightly separates the person being photographed from their background, and helps create a sense of unease.
Some critics have pointed out that the contact sheet for the iconic picture of the little boy in Central Park holding the hand grenades shows a whole series of shots in which the boy has a quite normal expression. Why then did Arbus choose to print the shot with the odd grimace? It’s a manipulation, they say.
That’s why she’s an artist, say her defenders, not a housewife taking photos in the park. And that little boy she photographed with the hand grenades in 1962 grew up to be quite a fan of the famous photo. His name is Colin Wood, and he says that Arbus caught some anger and frustration that was quite genuine in him at that time.
Diane’s depressions sometimes lasted for months. Once she called Gertrude in Florida and burst out: “Mommy, tell me the story of your depression and how you got over it.”
In 1971, Diane Arbus killed herself, at the age of 48. She took barbiturates, slashed her wrists and died in a bathtub. It was two days before Marvin Israel found her. There were no goodbyes to her children, no farewell note, and she left no will.
She once said: “The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.” She also said: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
Doon Arbus inherited her mother’s estate — and the curiously mixed feelings that people have about her mother. Both the worshipers and the scathing critics of Diane Arbus are not shy about the way they feel, and it’s a hard position for her daughters. Doon and Amy have both been quite protective of their mother’s memory, and reluctant to give authors permission to use her work in their own.
In 1984, without the cooperation of the Arbus family, Patricia Bosworth published a major biography of Diane Arbus. But the whole story has never been told. If you care about Arbus as an artist, you go back to her photos again and again. But you may feel the more they tell you, the less you know.