THE NEXT FEW YEARS were busy ones for the Arbuses, Yamashiro recalls. “They were starting to make money in photography. They were doing covers for Glamour and Seventeen and they did editorial work for Vogue; they had begun to get lucrative accounts from advertising agencies like Young and Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson. They did vodka ads and ads for the Greyhound Bus Company and Maxwell House Coffee which appeared full-page in Life magazine.”
“Diane and Allen Arbus were real comers,” remembers Fran Healy, who was an account executive for Young and Rubicam. “Diane shot the ‘Modess Because’ ads for me, and she did some terrific documentary stuff for a no-shrink shirt.”
Yamashiro recalls a sitting where there must have been thirty people milling around the Arbus studio, including another stylist, a hairdresser, a copywriter, and a makeup man. At one point General Electric installed an entire kitchen in the studio for a big layout they were shooting, and afterward told Diane and Allan they could keep it.
Such generosity didn’t impress the Arbuses; although they were increasingly active as photographers both in fashion and in advertising during the 1950s, it was impossible to know them and not hear complaints from them about “the business.” They hated “the business”—meaning the fast-paced, trendy world of commercial photography—even though that world, in the middle fifties, was experiencing a veritable golden age. Television was in its infancy; there were no filmed TV commercials, so advertisers were pouring millions of dollars into magazine campaigns, for beer, cigarettes, cars, deodorants. Life and Look were swollen with ads. Every photographer wanted a piece of the action.
“But to get a piece of that action you had to be precise and clever and calculating twenty-four hours a day,” says Art Kane, “and you had to hustle your ass off.”
Diane and Allan tried to hustle by giving elaborate dinner parties in their new studio, to which they’d invite advertising executives, some fashion editors, a copywriter or two. Whenever Howard came down from Bennington, he would be included at these dinners, and he always left the studio feeling that “Diane and Allan were leading an unreal but glittering life.”
Unfortunately, the dinners didn’t work in terms of getting more assignments, Alex Eliot says, “because Diane and Allan were incapable of operating. Diane always mixed lousy cocktails, couldn’t make chit-chat; Allan would get nervous and very cold.” They had no idea how to orchestrate the kind of relaxed, noisy gatherings that photographer Milton Greene threw at his penthouse studio on Lexington Avenue. There everybody operated like mad, but avoided discussion of topics like the hydrogen bomb, and models who lived on codeine and raw hamburger to keep their weight down got into vicious fights with their lovers. “The fashion/ad crowd was the meanest, smuggest, drunkest bunch of people you ever saw,” the late designer Charles James said.
Eventually Allan told the Eliots, “No more parties in the studio. It’s like entertaining at the bottom of a swimming pool.” The ceilings were too high, he complained, and the place looked unfurnished, no matter how much stuff they put into it.
Instead he and Diane utilized the studio as a backdrop for their really theatrical assignments. They were probably most successful with big entertainment spreads for the Christmas issue of Glamour, which they shot in July. “They asked some of their friends and a few models to participate,” Tina Fredericks says. “We milled around in heavy clothes, ate wonderful food, had a ball. Allan would shoot the spreads in color and they looked marvelous.”
Nancy Berg, a beautiful brunette model, was booked regularly by the Arbuses then. “It was in the days when models were treated like shit,” Berg recalls. “Other fashion photographers wanted to shave my eyebrows off, just to get an effect in the picture—they didn’t care how I might feel. I was treated like an object at most studios. But the Arbs (as they were called) were terrific to work with. They treated me like a human being.”
Nancy posed in a great many Judy Bond blouse ads for the Arbuses. “Diane and Allan would alternate with the shooting. Allan was more vocal—more dictatorial than Diane. When she photographed me, she never said much, but I got a sense of psychic strength from her. There was great nonverbal communication between us. And the studio was quiet, almost tranquil—not like the other studios I was booked into.”
As one of the top models of her time, Nancy worked everywhere—at “factories” like the barn-sized Pagano on East 65th Street where Sears, Roebuck had its fashion catalogues done and Macfadden posed the True Confessions pictorials. Then there were the photography studios massed in the 480 Lexington building which was connected by a ramp to 247 Park, where the John Robert Powers agency was located. The ramp made it convenient for the Powers models to traipse across to their bookings; the halls of both buildings smelled of developer and greasepaint.
During this transitional decade of the fifties (transitional because at the start stills and movie images dominated the public’s eye; at the decade’s end they’d both been replaced by television) New York was a mecca for a wild variety of photographers and not just in fashion. Rents were low, so photographers could live and work cheaply out of Murray Hill brownstones or lofts on the Bowery. “Everybody knew everybody else in the business and some of us did more than one thing,” says Bob Cato, who, like Art Kane, alternated as art director and photographer. “It was a rich, exciting time,” adds Walter Silver. He’d begun to document painters such as Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers hanging around the Cedar Bar. Meanwhile dozens of other “street photographers” were wandering all over Manhattan snapping their cameras. Ruth Orkin and Jerry Liebling, veterans of the Photo League, immortalized views of Central Park or bleak new housing projects or just faces. Roy De Carava eloquently depicted Harlem.
Many of these photographers were supporting themselves in photojournalism since it was the heyday of the large-format mass-circulation magazine. Photojournalism of the 1950s was a visual medium of immense power and influence, often defining the way people saw the world. Pictures in Life magazine by Leonard McCombe, Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, and others stated attitudes, aroused curiosity, dramatized events, and occasionally even reflected the wacky smugness of the time—like Philippe Halsman’s Life cover of thirty chorus girls immersed in a cloud of soap bubbles.
Often Life photographers complained that their editors manipulated the photojournalistic process, shaping images to conform to a specific idea or point of view. Eugene Smith, perhaps the quintessential photojournalist of the 1950s, rebelled. He eventually quit Life after his editors condensed what he planned to be a thirty-page essay on Albert Schweitzer into twelve pages.
In 1955 Smith agreed to be part of Edward Steichen’s gigantic exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Family of Man.” * Most photographers of the period agreed as well—photographers like Elliott Erwitt, Ken Hey man, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Wayne Miller, to name only a few. It was “perhaps the last and greatest achievement of the group journalism concept of photography in which the personal intentions of the photographer were subservient to the overall concept of the show”—the concept being a benevolent, sentimentalized view of humanity. This was not shared by the younger, more rebellious photographers represented in the exhibit. Photographers such as Louis Faurer and Robert Frank were starting to document the Eisenhower years in their own idiosyncratic way. They were challenging the moral complacency of America with savage, grainy images—despairing couples, dingy Times Square bars. Frank called “The Family of Man” “the tits and tots show” because there were so many pictures of kids and bare-breasted mothers or just contented families (including Diane and Allan’s bland portrait of a young father flopped on a couch reading the Sunday paper to his son).
Diane knew both Robert Frank and Louis Faurer casually (they’d all done fashion ads for Bonwit Teller). Once Diane had complimented Faurer on his portrait of a retarded man holding a flower. She responded to his emotional chaotic style—his images were often eccentrically cropped, faces were sometimes out of focus. This approach went totally against the Stieglitz philosophy, which valued perfect printing, classical composition, and tonal quality in a photograph. What Faurer did, and then Robert Frank, was to forget about elegance and experiment with exaggerated scale and light and shadow. This style ultimately became known as the “snapshot aesthetic,” which hooked right onto the modernist sensibility.
Diane responded to that aesthetic. To her a photograph seemed more “real” when it was composed like a snapshot. On her own she would photograph Cheech—blurred—laughing—in motion. She photographed Jane Eliot and May ice-skating at dusk in Central Park. Alex still has that Brueghelesque portrait: inky-black images skimming across a scratched white pond.
But mostly Diane and Allan continued to work in fashion. They built their elaborate sets and cautioned their models to pose serenely and the pictures were invariably stiff and clean and neat. “Once just for the hell of it Allan got his models tipsy on champagne and then things got silly and disorganized,” Alex Eliot says. “Allan hated that. He said never again.”
He and Diane had many assignments from Glamour and Vogue, although Irving Penn was the “star” photographer at Condé Nast, producing luxurious, reasoned, structured fashion studies. As for “the Bazaar,” as it was snootily called, Diane and Allan had never been able to impress the wily, brilliant art director Alexey Brodovitch* with their portfolio.
Richard Avedon remained his favorite. Avedon dominated the magazine throughout the fifties and into the sixties with his wit and dazzling inventiveness. He covered the French collections on location in Paris, collaborating like a movie director with his models—Dovima, Sunny Harnett, Suzy Parker, and the exotic China Machado—and every image Avedon made was fraught with glamour and passion and a hectic gaiety.
Someone at Condé Nast said, “Diane and Allan were classy people whose pictures sold fashion, but you didn’t get excited by them.” In her history of fashion photography, Nancy Hall-Duncan writes, “The work of Diane and Allan Arbus was done in the studied mold of the time, having no real influence in the field.”
Whether or not Allan cared about being influential as a photographer, nobody knew; he was a self-contained man who kept such thoughts to himself. He had tried to become a serious photographer in Italy, experimenting with blurred street images. Some of his pictures were “marvelous,” according to Alex Eliot, “but Diane’s crude portraits of Roman street urchins were even better,” perhaps because she was already developing a distinctive point of view.
Friends wondered if Allan was upset about Diane being the better photographer. “It’s rough on a guy when his wife is obviously more talented,” Rick Fredericks says. “But Allan not only accepted it, he even talked about it. He was proud of her visual gift as a brother or father might be.”
By himself he would struggle to perfect his photographic technique. “Allan was technically excellent,” says an advertising executive. “The problem was, he was often unable to apply his technique to any specific idea—which is where Diane came in. She always had an idea.”
Still, he would keep on studying light—the essential matter of photography—and the differences between the quality and quantity of light and the nature of light, and he would photograph a white screen over and over to test emulsions. He also used a special kind of lighting with a hanging reflector that he lowered or raised, and he would bounce strobe light off a corner of the reflector to achieve a soft and romantic effect. And he would stay for hours in the darkroom using up box after box of expensive Adox paper until he came up with the perfect print. And Diane would sit silently next to him as he printed an image over and over and over.
When he finished, he would go off to his room and practice the clarinet. He spent more and more time practicing the clarinet, and he never stopped dreaming of becoming an actor. But he knew Diane was as obsessed with the peculiar power of photography as he was with the art of make-believe, so he kept urging her to take pictures on her own: at least she could be doing what she wanted, even if he couldn’t.
And she couldn’t stop anyway—she always had a camera, usually a Leica, in her hand. Even when she was carrying on a long conversation with Pati Hill, she would have her eye pressed up against the viewfinder.
She snapped pictures all the time, although she had no particular focus or goal, just a vague, inarticulate feeling within her that somehow she wanted to photograph the private, secret experiences of people and of worlds hidden from public view. But she was too shy to ask strangers to pose, so instead she took pictures of friends.
She photographed a great many children*: enraptured Puerto Rican kids watching a puppet show in Spanish Harlem; a tiny, seemingly deformed boy and girl laughing into her camera (this picture became a 1962 Evergreen cover). Then there were endless candids of her daughters, Doon and Amy, and portraits of Frederick and Isabel Eberstadt’s son, Nick, “but Nick disliked Diane so intensely the hostility radiated from the photograph.” (In contrast, the Eberstadts’ daughter, Nena, loved Diane—“went ape over her,” Eberstadt says. “After Diane photographed her, she jumped up and down and tore off all her clothes and went racing around our apartment.”)
Later Eberstadt arranged for Diane to go out to his father’s estate on Long Island’s North Shore to take a portrait of the distinguished financier presiding over a luncheon. Diane kept clicking away until the elder Eberstadt ordered her to stop. “You’ll give me indigestion!” Afterward he told his son, “Anyone who insists on taking pictures of people having a meal should be put out in a barn!”
* Smith’s affirming picture of his two little children emerging from a dark wood into the sunlight capped the exhibit.
* The first art director to conceive that a magazine should have a distinctive design philosophy; that visuals could express a point of view as clearly as editorial content. At Bazaar he revolutionized the magazine with bold new layout concepts integrating photographs and text with white space which gave excitement, fluidity, and aesthetic unity to the magazine pages.
* John Szarkowski notes: “Her most frequent subject in fact was children—perhaps because their individuality is purer—less skillfully concealed—closer to the surface.”