ALTHOUGH THEY ARE INVARIABLY linked, Diane never admitted to being influenced by the photographer Robert Frank. Indeed, her very formal portraits of eccentrics and extremes, taken with the primitive frontality of an old-fashioned daguerreotype, bear no resemblance to Frank’s abstract, powerful set pieces of Midwestern highways and bleak automobile graveyards. But in the beginning Diane did copy his abrupt framing process before going on to a more elaborate one. And she often referred to Frank’s ironic pictures in his book The Americans as a major turning point in documentary photography.
Frank and his sculptor wife, Mary, were part of a loosely knit artistic community that by the late 1950s was flourishing throughout Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Diane had become acquainted with some of the group through her friendship with the art dealer Richard Bellamy. He knew everybody, it seemed: de Kooning, sculptor Bill Smith, poet Allen Ginsberg, painter Alice Neel, novelist William Burroughs, and the exceedingly handsome young couple Miles and Barbara Forst (both Abstract Expressionists), who gave wild parties where much pot was consumed. (This was still considered quite daring.)
Cheech thinks Diane and Robert Frank had their first extended conversation at a dinner party she gave in Spanish Harlem in the mid-fifties, at which the Forsts and Richard Bellamy were also present. “It was a rather uncomfortable evening because everyone there was shy and withdrawn. Robert had his usual stubble of beard and was his usual cagy, surly, Swiss-German self, and Diane grew even more tongue-tied in his presence as the evening wore on.”
The Franks were often described as a “pagan couple,” madly in love and so poor they frequently existed on a diet of bananas and Coca-Cola. Their children, Pablo and Andrea, ran wild. One of them had recently been hit by a car.
Mary was trying to sculpt massive wooden forms in her badly lit studio on the bottom floor of the Franks’ 10th Street two-story loft. Walker Evans told his wife he hated to pass through Mary’s section of the loft because he could sense her frustration at being so poor, at being so hampered by her kids. “Mary wasn’t allowed to be an artist in those days,” a friend says. “Everything had to focus on Robert. And Robert had a Norman Mailer complex. Powerful desires.”
When they were first married (Mary had been just sixteen), they had lived in Paris, where Robert photographed in the streets, using a handheld camera like his mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Frank’s early pictures were blurred, grainy, and so full of movement it seemed as if he were rushing to capture everything in his lens: a couple lounging by a jukebox, limousines gliding through the rain. The images scarcely seemed composed at all.
In 1947 the Franks came to New York and Frank began photographing for Fortune, Life, Harper’s Bazaar. The pay was terrible ($50 a picture), so for a period he supported his family by creating a long series of award-winning cinéma vérité ads extolling the virtues of New York City for the New York Times. Louis Faurer, who shared Frank’s darkroom from 1947 to 1951, writes: “Bob kept saying ‘Whatta town! whatta town!’ ” (Faurer was then the quintessential street photographer, chronicling—almost feverishly—raw Manhattan faces and places with complete indifference to traditional composition. Frank was obviously influenced by Faurer’s photojournalistic portraiture. Both men loved to salvage negatives made in hopelessly dim situations and produce eloquent, grainy prints.)
Louis Silverstein, who was Frank’s art director at the New York Times, says, “Robert was one of the most innovative photographers I’ve ever worked with. Technically masterful, but everything he did seemed spontaneous. He’d ‘direct’ the ads as if they were little novels. Cast faces and locations like the Staten Island Ferry or the Fifth Avenue double-decker bus. His response to the world was so direct it was very pure. But there was always a suggested tension in his photographs between style and subject, because he never stopped exploring the photographic form. Which made his images more complex.”
Looking at him, it seemed hard to believe that Frank had got his start as a fashion photographer for Harper s Bazaar. He and his family lived with nine cats in a grungy loft, and when he came to the Times he would be wearing the most tattered jacket imaginable—the lining would be hanging out and he would deliver his pictures in a filthy manila envelope.
“That’s the way Robert was,” Silverstein says. “It was no affectation. He seemed suspicious of any institution and certainly the Establishment of journalism—the Academe. But he was fascinated by America—by its energy and diversity. He was determined to explore America, and he did.”
Accompanied by Jack Kerouac, Frank first went traveling across America on assignment for Life. But his pictures of the country were turned down “because they looked too much like Russia.” Then in 1956 Frank won a Guggenheim and spent the following year driving around the country again with Mary and their kids in a rattletrap car. Using Walker Evans’ Depression portraits as a guide, Frank photographed a series of eccentrically framed chiaroscuro images of desolate highways, cemeteries, parked cars, glaring TV sets, jukeboxes, sullen faces that eschewed Evans’ classicism for something far more fugitive and ephemeral; his pictures reflected both the ironic complacency of the 1950s and their undercurrent of despair.
“I shot and developed rolls of film in about three different places and made contact sheets—fifty contact sheets in New York, fifty in the South, fifty in California,” Robert Frank told Walker Evans during a photography seminar at Yale in 1971. “I looked at them when I printed them, but I didn’t choose any photographs. I just looked at them and saw they were recurring images like the jukebox or the cars or the flag, and so it got bigger and I turned back again and took another trip to Detroit. Then I came back to New York and I enlarged all the pictures I liked, maybe two hundred of them, put them up on the wall and then eliminated the ones I didn’t like. Then I put them together in three sections and I started each section with the American flag and each section with no people and then people.”
Familiar now, Frank’s wild freely framed iconography was so radical in 1956 that he couldn’t get anyone interested in the work (which he called The Americans) until he got a friend to publish it in France in 1958. Grove published a U.S. edition in 1959; it slowly became a kind of underground classic. The introduction by Kerouac began: “To Robert Frank. You got eyes.” Indeed Frank’s personal documentary style along with a poetic vision full of narrative soon revolutionized photography.
A 35-mm. camera and wide-angle lens helped him create a complex new candid style that was “both situational and contextual…” one image played against another. Frank influenced scores of younger photographers including Diane, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, and Arthur Freed, and they began in their own ways to explore the strange, threatening, hidden America Frank was discovering. Some of them made similar crosscountry pilgrimages to do so.
Frank always worked out of deep depression and he photographed The Americans in a depressive state. When it was done, friends say he was emotionally exhausted. He completed one more essay called “Bus Series” (pictures taken on a bus moving across West 42nd Street) and he would periodically take on assignments for Bazaar and later Show magazine. But he kept saying he was sick of “stalking, observing, then turning away with my camera.” He didn’t want to repeat himself. In 1958 he began making documentary films.
When Diane and Allan got to know him, he was in the midst of shooting Pull My Daisy in collaboration with the Abstract Expressionist Alfred Leslie and Jack Kerouac. There were constant fights about whose film it was, but everybody agreed the focus would be on the sights and sounds of the Beat Generation. The setting was Frank’s shabby loft on East 10th Street, and it begins with Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg wandering around and ad-libbing about bop, Groucho Marx, and Buddhism. Other characters join them—Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. Richard Bellamy plays a bishop who preaches to the bums on the Bowery; Delphine Seyrig floats through, flapping an American flag; composer David Amram plays himself. Allan Arbus and Mary Frank have bit parts. Nothing much happens. There is a lot of coughing and scatting—Anita Ellis sings “The Crazy Daisy”—and one gets a sense of a group of sweet, funny people who are innocently self-aggrandizing.
Walter Gutman put up $12,000 to finance the project, which is now considered a documentary classic. He also bought Mary Frank a fur coat. Gutman, a Wall Street broker, wrote an offbeat newsletter about the stock market with advice like “Buy a Rothko now.”
(After Pull My Daisy was completed, Frank made eight more movies, including OK with Susan Graham before she married Charlie Mingus; Me and My Brother about Peter Orlovsky’s catatonic sibling; and the infamous, raunchy Cocksucker Blues about a Rolling Stones tour across America, which tells much about the side effects of power, boredom, and isolation on rock-and-roll superstars.)
By 1958 Frank found himself positioned near the frantic intersection of the art world and the counter-culture. Around him his friends were discovering Hinduism, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs like LSD and mescaline; everybody suffered from violent hangovers. “It was an insane time,” Frank said. New York painters had suddenly achieved a liberating self-awareness by moving away from the suffocating Paris-based aesthetics. Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, were becoming big names. Frank knew these artists, and others just starting out—like George Segal, who was painting Impressionistic abstractions, and Myron Stout, who composed hard-edged canvases in black and white—and Richard Bellamy gave them shows at the Hansa, now located in a walk-up gallery facing Central Park.
“It was insane,” Frank repeated. “Insane.” De Kooning spent an entire year on a single canvas, painting it over and over again because he didn’t think it was working. Kline sketched drawings across the pages of telephone books, and Elaine de Kooning tore sports photographs from newspapers in order to study their “abstract compositions.”
“I learned a lot from these people,” Frank said. “They had a lot to do with my development.” (In The Americans he demonstrated how he could snap images in the energetic, responsive spirit of the Abstract Expressionists, but without any painterly effects.)
With Frank and his friends, the subject of money was avoided. (To pay the rent, everybody took odd jobs—at the post office, in restaurants, at department stores.) Publicity among artists was never an issue—in the 1950s the press was indifferent to the art world anyway; Jackson Pollock’s spread in Life magazine had been a fluke. As yet, the galleries hadn’t turned exploitative or commercial. “We were a scruffy, excitable lot,” says painter Buffie Johnson, who “floated through the group” from 1950 on. “It was us against the world.”
Even though the Franks never had any money, there was always food on their long artist’s table—quiche, fresh raspberries, pickled watermelon with ginger. And sometimes Mary Frank and Barbara Forst would give joint parties at the loft, to which Diane and Allan might come, spectacular parties for which they would cover the walls with rolls of white photographic paper and then paint jungles of huge flowering trees and beasts and birds and exploding stars. An entire world would be created, and then the neighbors—like de Kooning and Milt Resnick—and other painters and photographers would crowd into the loft to dance and drink and smoke till dawn.
Theirs was a frantic, tortured community bursting with vitality and gossip and sexual experimentation. “Everybody was in everybody else’s pocket,” the dancer Sondra Lee says. “There was rivalry, yes—egos were gargantuan and there was a lot of competition—but the struggle was private and not corrupted by media.”
In those days, the graphics designer Loring Eutemay says, “It didn’t matter if you were a good Abstract Expressionist—what really mattered was, could you play the bongos well? Could you dance all night? We danced constantly in those days—incessantly. God, it was fun.”
The painter Marvin Israel would hire a van and everybody would pile in and go up to the Hotel Diplomat in Harlem—“everybody” meaning Marvin and Margie Israel, Anita and Jordan Steckel, Diane and Allan Arbus, Robert and Mary Frank, Miriam and Tomi Ungerer, and lawyer Jay Gold. “Mary was the greatest dancer of all,” Eutemay goes on. “She’d studied with Martha Graham, and she had a magnificent body, and she could dance and dance and dance, sometimes all by herself.”
Often Robert Frank stood on the sidelines with Diane and they both observed the action on the dance floor. Diane yearned to dance, too, but believed she could not.
As she became more committed to photography, Diane moved deeper into downtown bohemia. But nobody ever thought of her as a particularly visible or articulate member. “She began appearing at places; eventually she was just there, a presence,” says Rosalyn Drexler, who remembers her as a gentle, passive creature who could be open and friendly one minute and remotely mysterious the next.
Sometimes when Allan was at mime class in the evening, Bob Brown might take Diane to the Cedar Bar on University Place, where they might sit with the sculptor Sidney Simon or the watercolorist Paul Resika. “Diane never drank, but she had a way of listening which drew people to her like flies to honey,” Resika says.
Diane also belonged to another group—of spectacularly talented women who were still for the most part “underground.” Among them: Mary Frank, Anita Steckel, Rosalyn Drexler (who wrote hilarious, far-out plays and novels, who painted and was also a wrestler). Then there were film-maker Shirley Clarke and the novelist Pati Hill (who was usually in Paris, but remained very close to Diane). None of them had come into her own yet, but you assumed they would, they were so restless and ambitious.
In another league entirely was the chain-smoking Maya Deren. Deren—voluptuous, hyperenergetic, always broke—is today recognized as a major figure in American avant-garde film. Even in the fifties she was regarded as someone special. She taught, lectured, and wrote, directed, and produced a series of films, among them the classic surrealistic Meshes in the Afternoon and Rituals in Transfigured Time, which shows the passage of woman from bride to widow. In both Deren herself played the protagonist. Cheech had begun to work with Deren and worshipped her as she worshipped Diane.
In the summer of 1958 the Franks and the Arbuses rented houses near each other in Truro on Cape Cod, and Mary began drawing prodigiously: the curve of the beach, the line of the ocean. The light on the Cape was clear, shimmering, pierced with deep shadows. Diane photographed a lot that summer—most memorably her younger daughter. Amy, in a flannel nightie just before taking her afternoon nap. That eloquent photograph was later published in Harper’s Bazaar and then in the Time-Life book on Children in Photography, which commented: “Amy stands tiny, indomitable, against a background of storm-tossed clouds. She appears to have all the charged emotion of a 19th Century romantic.”
Near the end of the summer Mary Frank sketched some of her dreams. (Later a critic likened her sculptures to “pieces of dreams—part memory, part desire.”) She and Diane had become good friends; among other things they shared was a strong belief in dream images.
Back in New York that fall, the Forsts, the Arbuses, the Franks, and several other couples continued to see one another: in the Village, at screenings of underground movies, at Happenings—the rage of the late fifties. Between the couples, except for Diane and Allan, the unspoken competition was “ferocious,” Barbara Forst says. “The men in our group sensed that the women were as talented as they were—in some cases maybe more so. Certainly we were different, and they were threatened by that and by our productivity, and they demeaned us and made us feel insecure. We were like handmaidens to our men—mothering, accommodating, putting off and in some cases putting down our own work—sometimes hiding or destroying it.”
Whenever the women met for coffee, five or six of them, they would tell anecdotes about the men in their lives—their husbands, lovers, casual pick-ups, old boyfriends. None of the women was a feminist—certainly Diane wasn’t; they never used that word. “We were just female, so basically we mistrusted each other,” Barbara Forst continues, and they tried to woo and keep their men in the old ways, and tried to ignore their incompatible longings, their lacerating fights. Anger rather than tenderness seemed to be the chief means of communication between each couple—again with the exception of Diane and Allan, who didn’t seem angry at each other so much as “cut off from each other and traveling on different wavelengths.” “Everybody was screwing everybody else compulsively,” Forst recalls. “We all thought, Diane included, that sex was very important; that our bodies were a source of power—maybe our only source of power.” So the women talked of yearning to be “turned inside out—to feel naked, exposed, crushed, destroyed, and yet still remain alive.” None of them believed that all this infidelity would break up their marriages (although indeed most of their marriages broke up).
Most of these marriages were in chaos because of drugs or drink or some terrible disappointment. Most of the women still believed that being wives and mothers would be their salvation, their ultimate destiny, “so we were not sustained by our work. We were shy about talking about our work to each other,” Barbara Forst says. “We did not think our work was that important.”
Diane certainly believed hers wasn’t. She constantly vacillated about her photography—how could she ever make a living as a street photographer? Who would want her pictures of a tattooed lady? How could she pitch a story about a female bum to one of her chic editor friends on Madison Avenue? Nevertheless, she was bursting with ideas. She once walked from Eighth Street to the Upper East Side with Paul Resika, telling him of her dream to photograph “the great losers of the world—Adlai Stevenson, Robert Oppenheimer, Khrushchev,” and then she murmured, “If only Hitler were alive, I’d photograph him—he was the greatest loser of them all.”