BY THE MID-SIXTIES DIANE had become a familiar figure to most working photographers in New York City. She was seen everywhere—at art openings, at happenings, at the Judson Memorial Church, at Pop Art collector Ethel Scull’s party held at a Nathan’s hot-dog stand, at Tiger Morse’s fashion show, which took place at the Henry Hudson Health Club with stoned models showing off lingerie, then falling into the pool. “Diane was at every spectacle, every parade,” Bob Adelman says, “right up to the Gay Rights Liberation March of 1970.”
Adelman, who eloquently documented the civil-rights movement in the pages of Look magazine, recalls seeing Diane at “most of the protests against the Vietnam war. But she would never plunge into the crowd like the rest of us who were all going for a sense of immediacy, of grabbing on to the entire vista—we wanted to record the action. But Diane hung back on the fringes—and she’d pick out one face, like the pimply guy with the flag or the man with his hat over his heart.”
On assignment, in competition with other (mostly male) photographers, Diane could turn colder or more aggressive. Sometimes at an art opening or press conference she would hop about almost manically, click-clicking away at people until they’d run through their repertoire of public faces and stood exposed and blinking under the glare of her flash. “She used to drive people crazy at parties,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She’d behave like the first paparazzi. She didn’t talk much, but she’d swoop like a vulture at somebody and then blaze away. And she would wait outside a place for hours in any kind of weather to get the kind of picture she wanted.”
Sometimes it seemed as if every event in the sixties had been organized for the benefit of TV and still photographers. The media were creating a turbulent new world, based not on wealth and achievement but on being promotable (“Everybody can be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol predicted). So photographers were involved as never before in recording all this voracious hunger for publicity, for notoriety. Sometimes dozens of them would compete for a single image: at Truman Capote’s party for Katharine Graham, photographers went crazy as to whom to photograph first—Margaret Truman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, Henry Ford… But once again Diane would avoid the obvious image—the costume, the behavior, the visible effect—and would zero in close-up on a mismatched couple. The main detail, the woman’s pale, broad, freckled back.
She knew she had an advantage on the job in the company of men. In the beginning she was ignored, but even after she got better known she could still get away with a lot of things a man couldn’t. She’d appear insecure about her equipment; she couldn’t always load film into a camera; she’d flirt. “I’d stop at nothing to get the picture I wanted,” she told one of her students, Mark Haven. “And being a woman helped.”
She could usually sell most of the pictures she took, but she would refuse credit if the image didn’t come up to her standards. She was out to make a personal statement, no matter what the circumstances or assignment—she wished to be compared with no one, but to be better than the best. If she had a need to exaggerate the physical and psychological horror in her subjects, it was because she saw that beyond these exaggerations might lie transcendental worlds of absolute value. She would always go on exploring the question of identity versus illusion in her photography.
You see both in her ghostly, voluptuously daydreaming portrait of the ravaged former debutante Brenda Frazier taken for Esquire (“Frazier and I talked about nail polish,” Diane told John Putnam). When she photographed the Armando Orsinis, the Frederick Eberstadts, the John Gruens for a “Fashionable Couples” series in Bazaar, she insisted that they hold the same pose for up to six hours until, exhausted, they all revealed a terrifying sense of mutual dependency.
And she kept on scrutinizing the stoic self-sufficiency inherent in her subjects, as with the portrait she took of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in Esquire’s editorial offices. She had only a half-hour. Mrs. Oswald was there to sell her son’s letters to the magazine. “She was peddling all the artifacts she had,” Diane said. “And not only that, she was incredibly proud—like she had done the most terrific thing in the world…she looked like a practical nurse…and she was smiling—it seemed unnatural. Why was she smiling? What did she have to be so pleased about? We talked a little. She was dying to talk, you know? In fact, this was her big moment. [Her son had assassinated President Kennedy] and it was as if he had done something remarkable and she looked as if she’d manipulated the whole thing for forty years since she conceived him. She had this incredible look of authority, of pride.”
As Diane grew more confident, the subject matter in her own work grew more extreme. Her constant journeys into the world of transvestites, drag queens, hermaphrodites, and transsexuals may have helped define her view of what it means to experience sexual conflict. She once followed “two friends” from street to apartment, and the resulting portrait suggests an almost sinister sexual power between these mannish females. (The larger, more traditionally feminine figure stands with her arm possessively around the shoulder of her boyish partner. In another shot the couple is seen lying on their rumpled bed; one of them is in the middle of a sneeze—it is both intimate and creepy.)
Diane also photographed drag queens in their seedy little rooms at the Hotel Seventeen near Stuyvesant Park, and she spent a day with a transvestite at the World’s Fair in Flushing; they had an attack of giggling when he/she didn’t know whether to use the ladies’ or the men’s room.
Lately Diane had become friendly with “Vicki,” a huge, six-foot man who was a hooker; Vicki called himself “Vicki Strasberg” (after Susan Strasberg). Vicki took hormones and gorged on food so “she” would be plumper and more sexually desirable; she always dressed as a woman and whored as a woman, and supposedly no customer ever complained. Wherever they went, everybody ogled Vicki. She had “the most unbelievable walk,” Diane recalled. “I couldn’t see the man in her.”
Vicki was dangerous, mean. She knew how to use a knife and she tortured her cats and once she stabbed a customer and was sent to the Tombs. Vicki adored Diane and gave her presents (which she’d stolen from department stores) and invited her to her birthday party at her hotel at Broadway and 100th Street. “The lobby was like Hades,” Diane recalled. “People lounging around; the whites of their eyes were purple.” A stench, a congealment, a heaviness pervaded the place, and the carpet was littered with broken syringes and orange peels. The elevator didn’t work, so Diane climbed the stairs, stepping over inert figures on each landing. She arrived at Vicki’s shabby room carrying a birthday cake and Vicki was waiting for her; she’d attempted to decorate a little, but the balloons she’d bought were sticking to the wall and to the bureau instead of floating in the air as she’d planned. For a few moments Diane wondered where Vicki’s other friends might be and then she realized she was the only guest at the party. After a while she took photographs of Vicki semi-toothless and laughing on her bed, exposing her huge thighs. Near her balloon remains stuck on the side of the bureau.
Nobody would buy Diane’s portraits of drag queens at first. “In the early sixties drag queens were sociosexual phenomena,” Andy Warhol writes. He thinks Arbus was ahead of her time in terms of photographing them, because “drag queens weren’t even accepted in freak circles until 1967.” In the meantime, the more she photographed transvestites, the more she connected their sexual identity with “nature,” “personality,” and “style.” To a transvestite, sexual identity seemed to be more a predilection than a necessity of gender.
Finally, when Diane photographed the man in curlers and the woman smoking a cigar, she was able to capture the confusion of male and female identities trapped in a single personality.
Occasionally Diane would show some of her latest work prints of transvestites to Walker Evans. He also liked the portrait of Norman Mailer, which she’d taken for the New York Times. In this picture Mailer is clutching his crotch. “You actually get a sense of what it’s like to be Norman,” Evans told his wife later. (As for Mailer, he commented, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.”)
Evans was extremely pleased by Diane’s progress. He wrote: “This artist is daring, extremely gifted, and a born huntress. There may be something naive about her work if there is anything naive about the devil… Arbus’ style is all in her subject matter. Her camera technique simply stops at a kind of automatic, seemingly effortless competence. That doesn’t matter: we are satisfied to have her make her own photography speak clearly. Her distinction is in her eye, which is often an eye for the grotesque and gamey; an eye cultivated just for this to show you fear in a handful of dust.” He urged her to keep showing her latest pictures to John Szarkowski, the new head of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art.
Szarkowski had already seen Diane’s early work done in 35 millimeter (the eccentrics, Puerto Rican kids), but he hadn’t liked it very much because “they weren’t pictures somehow.” However, he’d been impressed by Diane’s elegance, her high intelligence, and her ambition… “there was something untouchable about that ambition.”
They became friends and she continued to bring stacks of work prints to his office at the museum, and as she began photographing more at contests and parties and in the street—almost always using her flash—her rough, uneasy style evolved and then her subjects began alternating between freaks and eccentrics and the frankly middle-class, all posed in the same grave, troubling manner. By 1964 she was really collaborating with the people she photographed—collaborating and confronting them as she hunted for their private faces. However, her central concern remained unwavering—it focused on the nature of being alone and our pitiful range of attempted defenses against it. Szarkowski realized that “Diane was a marvelous photographer—nobody else photographed the way she did. Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality.” On top of that she was running totally counter to the 1930s-’40s documentary photographers, who had tended to be almost benevolent to their subject matter and serene in their technique. Like Robert Frank’s, Diane’s attitude toward her camera was raw and unsettling. Szarkowski began re-examining his own definitions of documentary photography.
But at the same time he didn’t want to lose sight of the history or traditions of the medium—possibly a reason he suggested to Diane that she look more closely at Sander’s portraits (although today Szarkowski insists “Diane had already developed her own distinctive way of working”). However, studying Sander was just another step to work more deeply into “the endlessly seductive puzzle of sight.”
August Sander lived in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and from shortly after the First World War until Hitler put an end to his project in 1932 for being “anti-social,” he tried to record and document every archetype in his country—peasants, thieves, lawyers, pastry chefs, artists, Nazis, girls in their confirmation dresses, Jews, doctors, bankers. All his portraits are direct and confrontational, but never threatening. He didn’t want to make anyone look bad. “The portrait is your mirror,” he would say. “It’s you.” So Sander’s sitters would look at him without expression and give him back the sense of self-reflection he wanted. Diane was reminded by Sander that the camera has an infinite capacity to reveal.
She had been thinking about photographing archetypes—indeed, she already had (teen-agers, flower girls, weightlifters)—and often referred to herself as “an anthropologist of sorts.” Lisette Model repeatedly told her that the more specific you are, the more general you’ll be. “I thought if I photographed some generalized human being, everybody would recognize it,” Diane said. “It would be like the Common Man or something.”
Avedon was studying Sander, too—studying the frontal symmetrical compositions, the crucial confrontations with subject matter. Avedon wanted to pursue the prototypical, but he wanted to assemble prototypical celebrities—the instantly recognizable, like Eisenhower and Malcolm X; the bigger, the better. He resented being known as just a fashion photographer, so he was doing a book—his second* —and Marvin Israel was designing it and James Baldwin, his high-school classmate, was writing the text. It would deal with America after John Kennedy’s assassination—deal with the loneliness and violence in the country, deal with the rise of civil rights. Avedon’s photographs would range from horrific blurred candids taken inside a madhouse to marriages at City Hall. There were studies of a naked Allen Ginsberg, a doleful Marilyn Monroe, sinister, sneering pop singers, Arthur Miller with five-o’clock shadow, and harsh portraits of Adlai Stevenson, John L. Lewis, and Bertrand Russell.
Skin—that, oh, so permanent mask—was another focus: skin harshly lit against a bare studio background—aging, flabby, baggy skin, bleary eyes, dry, cracking mouths. Diane usually ignored age in a person’s face, but Avedon in Nothing Personal emphasized it—to him, age was a defining condition.
Avedon often had insomnia, and when he couldn’t sleep, he would call Diane and they would talk for hours. Occasionally they attended parties together, armed with their cameras. They photographed a reading that William Burroughs gave at which Larry Rivers, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol were present; they dropped by a fund-raising for Abby Hoffman held on a tenement rooftop—at this gathering the Fugs played obscene songs. They also participated in symposiums at one time or another at the New School along with Cornell Capa and Irving Penn, and they would discuss styles of portraiture. In public, Diane behaved as if she were in awe of Avedon—she would repeat how she envied his technical prowess, how she could never do the things he did.
Once she and Avedon agreed to be part of a workshop Bruce Davidson was holding in his studio on West 12th Street. Davidson had been experiencing a terrible creative block. “Suddenly I could not take a picture—couldn’t hold a camera in my hand,” and he’d been Cartier-Bresson’s protégé and with the prestigious Magnum photo agency for close to a decade. Famous for his pictures of Freedom Riders, the first moon launching at Cape Canaveral—“but suddenly I couldn’t touch a light meter—a piece of film,” he says. “Maybe it had something to do with the break-up of my first marriage or that I’d just had a lousy time trying to make it big as a fashion photographer.” For whatever reasons, he was teaching, “trying to get my creative juices going again.” He’d selected ten students from various walks of life—among them a suburban housewife, a retired businessman, and a high-school dropout named John Gossage, who’d spent most of his time memorizing the entire photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Gossage went on to become a fine photographer as well as a special friend of Diane’s.
“And I asked Kertesz, Avedon, and Arbus to participate by showing their work for an evening,” Davidson says. “Kertesz brought his photographs of a naked man sitting on a rock, a woman in repose on a sofa, a cloud next to a tall building. Avedon showed his pictures of tormented patients in a mental hospital, an unmasked look at Marilyn Monroe. Diane brought in her portraits of an overweight family lying naked in a meadow, midgets posed in a bedroom, and a widow sitting in her ornate bedroom. Each photographer gave clues to their inner worlds.”
After one class, Davidson says, “Diane and I went for a walk around the Village and she began discussing Erich Salomon’s candid snapshots, and Jacques Henri Lartigue, who’d been photographing in France since he was a kid-before World War I.” Lartigue was fascinated by movement and he’d been recording it for almost fifty years—with enormous exuberance and a sense of the ridiculous: cars racing, people and dogs leaping, jumping, falling, caught in mid-air. “Diane started making me aware of the history of photography,” Davidson says, but still he couldn’t photograph.
A few weeks passed and Diane invited him to Atlantic City, ostensibly to see a burlesque show with her, but he sensed she was trying to get him interested in looking at the world again. He agreed to go with her, but said he wouldn’t take any pictures, although through force of habit he brought along his camera. As they drove across the George Washington Bridge and later through the tackiness of the old summer resort, he resisted looking out the window, though passing the Boardwalk he thought he could smell saltwater taffy. They attended the burlesque show, sitting through endless routines featuring flabby strippers and bad comics. Afterward Diane went backstage and showed Davidson where she’d photographed—in the dusty wings and filthy, airless dressing rooms.
For the rest of the afternoon they drove around a series of smog-covered little towns, very quiet in the heat, pausing for a while by the ocean, which was blood red in color. “I’ll never forget it,” Davidson says. A foul odor drifted through the thick, hot breeze. Air and water were obviously polluted, but nobody knew about pollution yet or that factories were dumping their wastes improperly. It was so hot that crowds were paddling about, despite the scarlet waters, and Diane took pictures of some of the bathers, who glared straight into her camera as she talked to them.
“You’re better taking pictures of people looking in the opposite direction,” she told Davidson, who had a sudden urge to photograph the bathers his way. But he didn’t, and it was getting late, so they started to walk back to the car, past a gas station and a motel. Suddenly they came upon a squat pastel stucco house set back from the highway on an incline. Behind the house was a yard filled with ugly plaster statues. A truck roared by, and with that Davidson started click-clicking away at the landscape with his camera. Then a fat lady with crazy eyes waddled into view shouting angrily that this was private property and she chased him away. Diane began to laugh and they ran back to the car. Later they parked by a lake “which did not have red water.” Davidson took a picture of Diane in her bathing suit. “Diane loved to swim.”
After that day Davidson slowly began photographing again. “I don’t know what happened—can’t describe it—except maybe Diane turned me on to the screwball aspect of the world.” He started photographing the New Jersey meadows, topless waitresses, West Coast trailer camps. Periodically he would drop by Diane’s house for coffee or he would join her when she had supper with Lisette Model. “God, those two women had a strong bond!” he says. “Reminded me of a mother and daughter.” (Model always denied this, but there was a parent/child aspect to the relationship. Diane hung on her every word; Model in turn treated Diane with extreme tenderness, like the child she’d never had.)
Model was fifty-seven now, but she looked older; her sturdy little body was quite bent, her hair snow white. However, her attitude toward people remained wary and intensely curious. She still spent most evenings sitting in Village cafés gossiping with old friends like Berenice Abbott.
Model was currently the most famous photography teacher in America (her students ranged from Larry Fink to Eva Rubinstein), but she had not taken a picture in over a decade. No one dared ask why, but Bob Cato, who’d worked with her at Bazaar, says, “Lisette had been intimidated by Avedon and Penn—by their energy, their aggressiveness. Lisette was shy, ‘Mittel-European’—she couldn’t make small talk with editors, with advertising types. It was unbelievably tough in the marketplace. It’s even rougher now, but back then—in the 1950s-’60s, when the photography community was smaller, more intimate, and everybody knew everybody—you still had to fight and struggle to get an assignment. Lisette couldn’t push herself.” (Model maintained that she never turned down work, but that her images were too strong for the magazines.)
So she invested most of her time and thought in her classes at the New School, and she taught Diane everything she knew. That is to say, she taught her that there are no pat answers or easy solutions to anything in art, and that every photographer sees differently (“some are instinctive, some are just strong”); seeing is a process of learning, and the main point is that you have to care passionately about your subject matter or forget it. Diane was the photographer Model envisioned herself becoming. Diane was fragile as a person but strong as an artist, and Model respected that because she, too, was a combination of delicacy and power. Model understood that many of Diane’s photographs had to be taken in order to relieve her mind of the faces and night worlds that were haunting it. Through some mysterious, unconscious force Diane was starting to create in her pictures a kind of art that would be both a release and a vindication of her life, and Model more than anyone understood this. So she encouraged Diane to brood for weeks about a subject—as she did with a young mother who resembled Elizabeth Taylor and had a retarded son. She’d noticed them on the subway and followed them home, and when she spoke to the woman about photographing her, the woman told her maybe but that she’d have to check with her mother first.
If a subject obsessed her enough, Diane would carefully go about gaining the cooperation and confidence of that person until—as in the case of the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike—she felt relaxed enough to pose. Diane treated almost everybody the same way—she was invariably cheerful and unjudgmental and had no pretensions about what she was doing, demanding self-revelation of herself as the price of the self-revelation of her subjects. This often left her exhausted after a session.
Until recently Diane had brought all her work to Model for criticism, but lately she’d told her, “Whenever I photograph, you’re looking over my shoulder, Lisette.” So for a while Model didn’t go over her contact sheets or enlargements. However, their friendship grew more intense. Diane confided in her as she confided in no one else. (“Oh—what she told me! Things I will never repeat!”) She talked about her daughters and their future, her continued dependence on Allan, her complicated feelings toward Marvin Israel, whom Model did not get to know until a decade later* when Aperture asked him to design Model’s book of photographs.
Model worried about Diane’s need to live in a constant state of euphoria. “She had to be flying—and sometimes she was, but sometimes she wasn’t. She became so depressed she’d rub her hand back and forth across my table and her voice was like a five-year-old girl’s.”
Evsa Model worried about his wife’s shifting moods; after being with Diane for several hours she would be drained. He didn’t like her spending so much time with Diane—he felt she was being exploited. To which Model would argue that such a thing didn’t exist. “Let me be exploited,” she would cry.
For the past two years Diane had been scribbling encouraging notes to the young pacifist Paul Salstrom, who was serving time in prison for refusing to register for the draft. He would write back, he says, “telling her of my plans to live off the land—to buy a farm, which I eventually did. I wanted to travel, too, and I used to encourage her to travel more—open up her life. Once I told her to go to Iceland to photograph the Eskimos. Maybe because I wanted to go to Iceland myself. I wanted her to photograph the communes some of my friends were starting in New England—the demonstrations against the war—the Diggers…the kids who were living in the desert with their gurus—but she wasn’t interested in that. She seemed more interested in stuff that was close to home.”
When he got out of prison in May of 1964, Salstrom came through New York and visited Diane’s Charles Street house. “It was a sunny weekend,” he recalls. “Diane’s brother, Howard Nemerov, was sitting there in the courtyard with his wife, Peggy. He seemed to be a kindly, courtly man. He talked about what it means to be a pacifist and how Robert Lowell had been a pacifist in the Second World War… It was the anniversary of David Nemerov’s death, so Howard and Diane spoke a little bit about their father to me.” Before he left, Diane showed Salstrom a big looseleaf book filled with her scribblings. There were pictures, snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings—like a collage. She envisioned it as a book she might someday publish—it would be called “Family Album.”
Compiling births, deaths, marriages, accidents, crises of the Russek and Nemerov clans and also the Arbuses—to her this was a most basic form of history. Diane was captivated not only by the number and variation and rearrangement of her images, but by the connections between her old photographs, moldering letters, clips, postcards. It was not just a story, but a story to which her life belonged.
During the winter of 1964, Diane met Gay Talese at Esquire and told him she admired a book he’d written entitled New York: A Serendipiters Journey, a highly impressionistic work that told the story of odd people and uncommon places in the city; it was a view of urban life that Diane identified with and was fascinated by, and she suggested that perhaps Talese might do a sequel and that she might accompany his text with photographs.
They discussed the project further over lunch but nothing came of it; nevertheless they continued to see each other for the next four years. “It was a deep friendship based on much professional compatibility and a delight in doing things spontaneously.” Talese says, “Diane, like myself, never planned things in advance. In fact I don’t ever recall having a scheduled meeting with her—it was always a last minute phone call, her saying, ‘What about meeting me at 59th and Lex for a movie in half an hour?’ Or, ‘Are you in the mood for dinner downtown after I get my daughter to bed?’ ”
Sometimes, Talese recalls, Diane would invite him to wander with her around 42nd Street or to take a bus trip to New England for which there was no particular destination. She liked to hang out at bus stations she would say—to study the transit scene, On occasion she would permit herself to be picked up by a stranger. “She was obviously courting danger,” Talese says. “In that respect she was like a man. Otherwise she was completely feminine. Lovely. Although she always seemed to be in another time. Whenever we were together I saw her as in another time. She’d be talking—about photographing nudists in Sunshine Park, New Jersey—and her face would take on an ashen quality. She’d go remarkably gray—out of focus. Often there was a sense of dust about her—as if she was uncared for. You wanted to wipe her off, and her skin looked older than it should have; it was as if she hadn’t put on cream for years. But God, she had a beautiful face! Gorgeous. Particularly in profile. And strange deep-set watchful eyes.”
Every so often she would mention her brother when Talese visited the Charles Street house. He saw Howard’s picture tacked up on the screen next to a contact sheet of the nudists she’d been photographing. She urged Talese to read Howard’s poems such as “The Town Dump,” which took its subtitle from King Lear: “The art of our necessities is strange that it can make vile things precious.”
In 1965 three of Diane’s earliest pictures were included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art called “Recent Acquisitions.” Yuben Yee, then the photo department’s librarian, recalls John Szarkowski choosing the Arbus photographs to exhibit from a pile of two thousand purchased from various photographers in the past fifty years. “We exhibited forty pictures altogether—a Winogrand and Friedlander, too,” Yee adds. Diane’s portraits were of two female impersonators backstage, a fat nudist family lolling in the grass, and a young nudist couple staring unblinkingly into the camera, against a background of grungy New Jersey woods. They seemed totally unaware of their absurd exposure.
Before the exhibit opened, Diane came to the museum several times to express her apprehension. She was worried about how the public would react. Indeed, during the course of the show Yee would have to come in especially early every morning to wipe the spit off the Arbus portraits. Public reaction to them was violent, Yee says. “People were uncomfortable—threatened—looking at Diane’s stuff.” When Diane heard about the spitting incidents, she left town for a few days.
“I thought there was something profoundly moving about the way Diane saw things,” Yee goes on. “She combined näiveté and conviction, and her images were direct and primitive. She stripped away all artiness, which the public wasn’t used to.” He would watch people in Szarkowski’s department at the museum—sophisticated viewers who would flinch when they looked at some of her pictures, like the headless man or the human pincushion. These repelled and disturbed people. “Diane Arbus’ pictures evoked powerful emotions,” says Jim Hughes, editor of Camera Arts. “I can’t think of a bigger compliment.”
By 1965 Diane’s focus had sharpened and her vision and her discomfort (actually, her inner projections of the world as she saw it) had become more pronounced. The electronic flash and the square format she was using gave her more control and outlined her subjects in nightmarish detail. Her portrait of the Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark is sneeringly strange, as is the old couple taken on a park bench—their expressions, bleached by daylight and flash, reveal a desperate and harsh despair. “I sometimes thought Diane Arbus believed in the devil,” John Putnam said. “She could psych out what a person was feeling. Her camera seemed to X-ray it and capture it as in a vise.”
He and Diane had begun to wander around the lower east side together, past the synagogues pressed close to the Ukrainian community. The supermarket, the bodega, and the kosher deli were side by side, competing for the hippies’ pennies. Hippies had replaced beatniks around Tompkins Square Park. Putnam says, “The whole area had come alive with a kind of ethnic combustion. Diane and I started thinking about photographing it.” Gangs from the Bronx and suburban teeny-boppers, all in wild clothes, congregated outside the Fillmore East, where rock concerts were now being given. “It looked like some gigantic Halloween party,” Michael Harrington wrote.
On Saturday nights Diane would wander around Bleecker and MacDougal streets and watch a group of bikers roar to a stop in front of the San Remo. Cheap wine bottles were smashed on the sidewalk. There was so much violence the local residents complained and the police tried to close the bars at four a.m., but a crowd of a thousand thwarted them.
At one point Diane phoned critic John Gruen, who lived on Tompkins Square Park. Gruen had just written a book called The New Bohemia about the Lower East Side becoming an “exciting new mecca for the arts—for freedom.” For a couple of days Gruen guided her around the East Village—Slug’s Saloon, the Peace Eye Book Store, the Film Makers Cinematheque, where Charlotte Moorman played the cello and stripped at the same time. Diane thought she might photograph the Keristas, the free-love group, which had rented a store on East 10th Street, called the City Living Center. But she found the kids there (both black and white) hostile and uninteresting, so she didn’t.
Instead she took her cameras to Washington Square Park. Originally the park had been populated by NYU students and middle-class mothers wheeling their babies around old bohemians playing chess under the trees. Now teen-age runaways milled about the paths from dawn to dusk, and young black and Puerto Rican kids kept their radios blaring rock-and-roll music and defaced the great white arch with graffiti: “collective cave painting,” Norman Mailer called it.
Diane soon discovered that the park was neatly divided into territories, with young hippies and junkies on one row of benches, hard-core lesbians on another. In the middle came the winos—“they were the first echelon, and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the part of the bench that belonged to the hippie junkies.” Diane found all of this “very scary.” She had become a nudist, but she could never be one of these people. There were days when she couldn’t photograph. She’d just sit and watch—watch the panhandling teen-agers, the kids so stoned their eyes wouldn’t focus. A strange sense of territoriality and aggressiveness permeated the area; everybody who came into the park regularly tended to look at it as his.
Other times Diane would photograph with flat, documentary exactness for up to six hours at a stretch. She got to know some of the long-haired, barefoot girls and the homosexuals holding hands. She got to know some of the hippies and the winos and the surly gang members from the Bronx who often had uneasy, pregnant girlfriends with them. She wanted to get close to them, so she had to photograph them. Sometimes she would talk to them, sometimes not. She realized, “It’s impossible to get out of your skin and into somebody else’s…somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.”
Occasionally John Gossage would sit with her while she photographed in the park. “She was gentle and funny and she had a disarming curiosity,” he says. She also had “an incredible quality—of involving you in yourself.” She would figure out that you had a problem and she would ask around it and you’d find yourself blurting out some private thing. Gossage had not uttered a word until he was twelve years old—simply because he hadn’t felt the need to communicate with anybody. Diane got him to talk about it to her—“I don’t know how or why.”
Invariably she would have to break off from a project because she needed money. She’d won another Guggenheim “to learn about everything I don’t know about: sex, secrets—for picture pictures…” but she always complained that she needed money. She kept looking for more free-lance work. Avedon helped her get assignments to do educational film strips, which she hated, but they paid some bills.
She attended a meeting for Guggenheim winners at Bruce Davidson’s. Bob Adelman says, “Dorothea Lange had the idea that documentary photographers should band together and get major funding from government, from institutions, so that as a group we could record and document the sixties the way the thirties had been. A lot of us were enthusiastic about the idea, but Diane was only interested if it brought her money.”
She was making very little money, but she was developing a rather fearsome reputation with magazine art directors—as a photographer who laid bare in her portraits ghostly psychological truths. For Bazaar she did an essay on relationships—the Gish sisters, friends Rudi Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, poets W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore—and she seemed to catch the ambiguities within these couples—the acute discomfort they all had in posing for the camera. But Diane’s photographs could also be conventionally beautiful, as with the dreamy, ethereal “Girl in the Watch Plaid Cap” which she took on Fifth Avenue sometime in 1965. It is as rhapsodic as a Julia Cameron portrait.
In the fall of 1965 Marvin Israel arranged for Diane to teach a class in photography at the Parsons School of Design. She agreed to teach darkroom technique as well, but backed out at the last minute,* so Ben Fernandez replaced her. Later he and Diane covered parades together and she advised him on his Guggenheim application.
One of Diane’s students at Parsons, Paula Hutsinger (now a herbalist in Soho), recalls that “Diane was a terrific teacher. She didn’t tell you to read the Jansen book of art history. Instead she took us to the Met and made us really look at objects—Greek statues, parade armor, Persian rugs, designs full of animals, Egyptian jewelry—everything and anything to make us really see and notice and collect images with our eyes.”
“In another class,” Paula continues, “she paired us off. We took portraits of each other. I took one of Michael Flannigan which she loved because I’d posed him on his spool bed; that made it ‘more revealing and personal,’ she said.” She always took note of a person’s personal possessions in her own photographs—the balloons in the transvestite’s bedroom, the geegaws in the wealthy matron’s home. She once planned to photograph John Putnam’s one-room apartment on Jane Street because it was crammed with his “artistic hang-ups”: drawing board, tape recorder, paints, hundreds of tiny tin soldiers, intricate sculptures, piles of rare books.
At Parsons, Diane brought books for the students to go over, such as Erich Salomon’s enduring portraits of 1930s German politicos and tycoons. Salomon was called “the Houdini of photography”—his lively, innovative work with a Leica (that small portable camera with fast lens and larger film capacity) enabled him to move into hitherto forbidden places—courtrooms, palaces, high-level meetings. Salomon’s spontaneous style was crucial to the development of photojournalism, Diane said. “He influenced Brassai, Eisenstaedt, Bresson.”
But she talked more about Weegee’s pictures in the New York Daily News. She admired news photography because it was factual. And Weegee’s images were factual in particular and they had a demonic edge to them, a pitiless quality she liked.
Weegee (born Arthur Fellig) got his nickname—an allusion to the Ouija board—because he always arrived early at newsmaking catastrophes. Recording violence was his specialty. His 1945 book, Naked City (which included his pictures of bloody corpses and firemen lugging body bags away from burning buildings), was later turned into both a TV series and a movie that made him famous.
Recently, Diane had gone with him on assignment in his battered Chevrolet, which was equipped with police radio and makeshift darkroom in the trunk. He was up until dawn, he told her. The infrared film and flash he used completely concealed his presence; he often prowled the beaches of Coney Island on hot summer nights and would take pictures of couples making love on the sand, or he would sneak into movie theaters and snap pictures of kids necking in the balcony.
Diane admired the extremes he went to when he zeroed in with his direct flash and wide-angle lens on every kind of disaster—suicide, murder, fire, flood, plane crash. And if an image failed to compose itself to his satisfaction, he would enlarge or crop it to bring it closer to the viewer. Often he would eliminate the background entirely by burning it a deep, flat black in his darkroom.
On assignment she was taking photographs of the black rock singer James Brown to illustrate a piece Doon was writing for New York magazine. She went first to Brown’s home in New Jersey to photograph him lounging under his beauty-parlor-sized hair dryer, and choosing glittering, costumes for his show. Next she photographed him in performance at the Apollo Theatre. She described the experience as “wild—it was like he was presiding over some mass freakout—the audience seemed crazed—scared.” But she loved the music—a Latin sound mixed with rock-and-roll beat. At the climax Brown sang “Please! Please!” and his voice got frayed and hoarse and he sank to his knees and writhed about before collapsing in a heap and covering himself with a voluminous gold cape. The audience’s screams were frenzied.
It reminded her of the Presley phenomenon back in the 1950s. Then there had been shock and wild acclaim. Nobody had known what to make of him. Nobody knew what to make of Brown.
Going home on the subway from the Apollo, Diane ran into Susan Brownmiller, who had covered the Brown concert for the Village Voice. “Don’t you love freaks?” Diane demanded suddenly. “I just love freaks.”
She was not exaggerating. She had grown increasingly fond of her collection of freaks and odd things at Hubert’s—the living skeleton, the embalmed whale, the ventriloquist with his two-headed cat. Diane still turned up at Hubert’s almost every day. When the museum closed in 1965, she took a picture of the core group, including Presto the Fire Eater, Congo the Jungle Creep, the midget Andy, and Potato Chip Manzini, the escape artist wrapped in chains.
“Diane said the picture would be published in the Herald Tribune, along with a story about Hubert’s demise,” Presto says. “But then Charlie Lucas, who ran Hubert’s, refused to sign a release—he’d been in the picture, too, so the picture wasn’t published. But Diane gave us each a copy.” Presto still has his copy of the picture—grainy, blurred—in his home in New Jersey; so does Harold Smith, formerly of Ringling Brothers, now of the 42nd Street Penny Arcade. Smith keeps his Arbus print in a manila folder in his hotel room.
Before the museum shut its doors, Diane asked for and got most of the eight-by-ten glossies of freaks that had been plastered across Hubert’s walls since the 1920s. Presto says, “She walked off with stacks of freak pictures in her arms.”
Sometime in 1966 Diane contracted hepatitis. She was treated by her therapist, who was also a medical doctor. (Earlier he’d prescribed antidepressants for her “blues” and she’d got some relief.) For a while he seems to have cured her hepatitis too, and she was very grateful since she was photographing day and night. Most of her latest pictures were up in John Szarkowski’s office at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum’s photography department was very casual and friendly then—the research library was still open to the public without an appointment, so that young photographers could browse through Edward Weston’s portfolios. And Szarkowski had not yet become so powerful or remote; his office door was never shut and Diane would wander in and possibly Robert Frank would be there, or Walker Evans, or Grace Mayer—Steichen’s trusted assistant—who had a tiny office down the hall.
Everybody in the department knew that Szarkowski was scheduling a major show for 1967 to mark the end of documentary photography’s romantic, benevolent vision of the world as expressed in the “Family of Man” exhibit. Replacing it would be the highly stylized, personalized approach of Diane’s freaks and eccentrics pictures. Garry Winogrand’s disturbing confrontations with animals and people, and Lee Friedlander’s images bouncing off plate-glass windows, storefronts, cars. “These are a new generation of photographers,” Szarkowski would write, “totally different from 1930s and 1940s photographers (such as Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Cartier-Bresson), all of whom either wanted to honor humanity” or use their art for social reform. “Arbus, Winogrand and Friedlander make no such claims,” Szarkowski continued. “What unites them is not a style or a sensibility…each has a distinctive and personal sense of what photography is as well as the meaning of it.” Diane, however, was the most radical aesthetically, since she would pose her subjects like a portrait painter and then record them in a snapshot structure. This clashing of contradictory styles was having a startling effect on her imagery, as is evident in her portrait of identical twin sisters; the combination of styles seems to pinpoint the eerie visual quality twins project—that of being both symmetrical and ambivalent. To Diane, twins represented a paradox she longed to continue exploring and she did. She would photograph actress Estelle Parsons’ twin daughters over and over again; she would photograph elderly twins and twins married to twins, and each picture seemed to ask what is it like to live in a body that is virtually indistinguishable from your twin’s? Diane suspected that the ultimate challenge was to try creating a separate identity.
Naturally she brought the twins portrait to Szarkowski and he decided’ to use it—he planned to exhibit at least thirty Arbus pictures. Diane, however, was reluctant to have her work shown at all. She kept saying no, even after Walker Evans told her she was a fool and Szarkowski had blown up some of her prints to mammoth proportions in an effort to convince her.
She was afraid she’d be misunderstood—afraid that her pictures would only be considered on the crudest level, with no self-reflection on the part of the viewer. Months went by. She told Szarkowski in a note she no longer liked some of the pictures he’d chosen—early pictures she’d I taken in 1962-4 while she was struggling to find her themes, her style.
Maybe she was still sick with hepatitis, she concluded, but she thought her latest pictures—like the twins—were better. So in the fall of 1966 Szarkowski would come down to the Charles Street house and go over Diane’s latest contact sheets and then she would print up some of his selections. She thanked him for his “steadying hand.”
Eventually she did agree to be part of “New Documents,” although she assumed from the start that most people would see only what they wanted to see in her misfits—the surface distortion. But once she agreed, she couldn’t stop talking about the exhibit, Garry Winogrand says. “She imagined all sorts of things coming out of the show.” She kept repeating how lucky she was, how terrifically lucky.
Winogrand, coming to the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department while Szarkowski was editing the exhibit, got to know Diane “a little bit.” He says, “Before that I’d been seeing her around for a couple of years taking pictures. A couple of us used to hang out at the same street corner—57th Street and Fifth.” “Us” meant Joel Meyerowitz and Tod Papageorge, who often accompanied Winogrand in his wanderings around New York. He was known as “the duke of street photographers” because his energy was so prodigious and he seemed more alive than anyone else to the endless visual possibilities in the frantic, brooding city.
Winogrand says he felt uneasy with Diane. “I thought her idea of being an artist was very different from mine. A shooting had to be hard to do; that’s why she lugged so much equipment around, I thought. Taking a picture couldn’t be easy—it couldn’t be pleasurable—because then it wasn’t art.”
It was true that Diane always appeared weighed down with equipment. “It was like her security blanket,” Chris von Wangenheim said. John Putnam recalls that earlier that year she carried “two Mamiya cameras, two flashes, sometimes a Rollei, a tripod, all sorts of lenses, light meters, film, when she was on assignment to photograph the American Art Scene for Bazaar.”
It took her weeks to complete, but this portfolio (some thirteen studies in all) turned out to be possibly her liveliest and most accessible portraiture. Out of it came an exuberant shot of Frank Stella on a tilt and displaying a goofy, toothless grin; James Rosenquist caressing his armpit; a bare-chested, handsome Lucas Samaras (who later evolved from paintings to Polaroids and said recently, “Diane Arbus influenced me”); Ken Noland wearing suit and tie; Claes Oldenburg clowning around with his wife. Obviously, Diane enjoyed this assignment, since she knew many of the artists personally—enjoyment radiates from the photographs, especially in her affectionate portrait of Richard Lindner, a tiny, wry man of great intelligence whose gigantic, earthy paintings of ferocious women, often nude, against a backdrop of sinister Times Square, had been construed as Pop Art; as a result, he was hugely successful in the sixties—by mistake, he would say. This amused him greatly.
Also included in this portfolio was a small shot of Marvin Israel, the only surrealist in the bunch, standing impassively in front of what looked like a blank canvas.
Some of the contacts were eventually published in the Village Voice, along with an article by Owen Edwards describing Israel as “Diane Arbus’s closest friend.” The piece itself was entitled “Marvin Israel, the Mentor Who Doesn’t Want to Be Famous.” In it Israel was quoted as saying, “Diane and I shared everything—opinions, ideas.”
She was seeing him now three or four times a week. Whenever she visited her mother in Palm Beach, she “phoned this Marvin person every day. He was obviously very important to her.” (When Mrs. Nemerov finally met Israel, he told her, “Diane doesn’t love Allan anymore, she loves me.”) Certainly she relied increasingly on his advice and counsel; she referred to him as “my Svengali” and spoke of being “under his spell,” “in his thrall.” Although it was understood that they both led independent lives, she tried to keep herself available for him and was known to drop everything just to be with him for a short time. She loved to come to his studio on lower Fifth Avenue when he was designing a new book. And there was a deep darkness inside Diane that responded to Israel’s violent paintings (as later expressed in a series of studies of dogs alternately embracing and tearing at each other’s guts). He was increasingly involved with his own projects, although he was still concerned with promoting and advising Diane as well as advising Richard Avedon (who calls him “my biggest influence”). But the two men often quarreled. If Diane and he fought, nobody knew about their arguments.
“In public, Diane always kept her distance with Marvin,” Emile de Antonio says. Even when they were among their coterie of intimates (attorney Jay Gold, Bea Feitler, Larry Shainberg), they remained cool and impersonal with each other. Sometimes they played intellectual “head games”—they were both expert at that. “It was like a weird battle,” said the late Chris von Wangenheim, “because Diane was so mystic and intuitive and Marvin could be so stubborn—calculating—cold.” And then they would go to a restaurant and Diane would seem to disappear. “Often it was as if she didn’t have any identity when she was around Marvin,” says literary agent Diane Cleaver, who had dinner with them a couple of times.
Occasionally he would abruptly criticize her clothes, her friends, her hesitant way of speaking. “Speak up!” he’d command when she was trying to explain something at a party. When she ignored him or escaped into a daze, he’d repeat, “Speak up!” and when she wouldn’t, he’d get wildly angry. (Diane used to remark how she was struck by female powerlessness in the face of male power, by the phenomenon of women who are strong with one another and in their work, but who break beneath the domination of male mentor or lover—they feel they must play the passive role.)
However, the next day Israel’s outburst would be forgotten and he would be trying to get Diane a book contract for her transvestite pictures or phoning Harper’s Bazaar about a possible assignment for her. According to an assistant in the production department, “Marvin kept in touch with Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel, who were art-directing Bazaar together. He’d keep at them with possible suggestions for Diane, so she worked a lot for the magazine.” And he was promoting her elsewhere with people who didn’t know her work as well. Bob Cato, then Vice President for Creative Affairs at CBS Records, recalls “Marvin making a lunch date with me at the Ground Floor, and when he arrived, Diane was with him—very shy, withdrawn. The entire meal was taken up with Marvin very eloquently and with great dignity seeing if there was some way Diane could be used. I’d just okayed the hiring of Eugene Smith to photograph some recording sessions. Marvin thought that possibly Diane might do that, too. He so obviously believed she was a singular talent—he spoke about her with such understanding and intensity and tenderness. I was very impressed.”
* His first: Observations, with text by Truman Capote.
* In 1979 they met in Model’s black apartment to go over possible layouts. “I was frankly very apprehensive,” Model says. For a while they just stared at each other in silence, and then Model remarked, “Until now I’ve always been afraid of you, Marvin.” And he said nothing for a moment and then he answered, “This is ridiculous. I’ve always been afraid of you.” And after that, Model said, “we got along all right.”
* She often professed ignorance about the technical side of photography. She once told a class she was never sure about loading a camera, confiding that she was always afraid she might insert a roll of fresh film incorrectly into the winding sprocket.