The photographer Saul Leiter, who also lived on East 10th Street, would help her carry her laundry when she felt too weak to do it herself. He noticed her lassitude, her melancholia. Once she asked him if he knew any “battered people for her to photograph.” He said he didn’t.
Diane subsequently went to another doctor (some friends said later he was a “quack”), who told her she was anemic and prescribed a high-protein diet. For a while she existed on hamburger and desiccated liver, and when she entertained, which was rarely, she fed people peculiarly.
To boost her spirits, Avedon and Israel had got her involved in Steve Laurence’s new Picture Newspaper, an all-photograph large-format publication that lasted through twelve issues from 1968 to 1971. There were various meetings about it at Avedon’s studio, followed by more meetings at Diane’s duplex. She seemed enthusiastic about what Laurence was doing and eventually let him use a photograph of Dracula taken off a TV set. She also let him use a picture of a crying baby along with a torn print of the pimply pro-war demonstrator wearing the I’M PROUD button.
“Diane pulled the prints out from a big stack at the bottom of her closet,” Laurence writes. “Most of the photographs were next to shoes and junk. Afterwards she cooked up a huge mound of hamburger in a frying pan and offered me some—part of it very burned—as she talked. She advised me about diet and health. She seemed terrified of getting sick.”
By July 1968 she was feeling no better, and she had lost eight pounds. She believed she still had all the symptoms of hepatitis, but the various doctors she went to could not diagnose her case. At one point she phoned Cheech, whom she rarely saw now, and asked, “Can you catch hepatitis from going to bed with a lot of people you don’t know?” Cheech says she was so appalled by the question she couldn’t answer.
On July 18, complaining of dizziness, nausea, and back pains, she was admitted to Doctors’ Hospital for observation and remained there for almost two weeks, undergoing a series of tests, including the 9.5 series, gallbladder tests, and a liver series, and with some apprehension she agreed to a liver biopsy. She was sleeping a great deal and feeling unduly weak. When Peter Crookston passed through New York, he saw Diane. “She looked wasted,” he recalls.
After more tests Diane’s condition was diagnosed as “toxic hepatitis ostensibly secondary to the combination of drugs used for depression and birth control.” She was immediately taken off all the drugs (including Vivactil) and given lots of vitamins. She began feeling better.
Released on August 5, she went home to recuperate, resting for long periods in bed and eating children’s food—Jell-O, oatmeal, mush. She rarely went back to a conventional diet, relying on raw and unprocessed foods as well as jars of honey for nourishment. Allan came by regularly to cheer her up, and after he left, she would phone Irene Fay and report, “My husband is taking wonderful care of me.”
She still felt very weak. Eventually Marvin Israel took her to a party at attorney Jay Gold’s. Loring Eutemay remembers that “Diane looked really awful. Hollowed out. Gray-skinned. Like a concentration-camp victim.”
She wrote to Crookston: “During convalescence a strange rage developed in me, appearing every night like a werewolf. It feels like a raw wild power. I don’t know how you make it energy.”
It was deep in the summer and very hot, and when she couldn’t sleep and was restless in her depression, she would go up to the roof of her building and curl up there. Sometimes she would knock on Seymour Krim’s door. Krim, an iconoclastic writer, a chronicler of the beats, was currently editing Nugget magazine. He had lived in the apartment below Diane’s—one tiny room overflowing with books—for more than twenty years, cooking on his hot plate, laboring over his unpublished novels, grinding out his energetic essays. He hoped to die there, he said.
Krim would invite Diane in and they would talk. “I always thought she had an animal quality,” he says. “Quick movements—silence—withdrawal, and then a total giving and opening up. But you could never predict how she’d be. What we shared as opposed to where we differed was a concern with the troubles of living with oneself. We both came out of the psychoanalyzed generation and that concern—perhaps over-concern—with self. She was a kind friend to be with or talk to on the phone. I always felt she understood or would understand, no matter what the problem. I guess this stemmed from her own psychological duress, but it made her as intuitive as a good dancer to the moods of others.”
A book of Krim’s essays, called Shake It for the World, Smartass, was being published, and Diane offered to take his author photograph. “She snapped me sprawled across my bed, fast asleep. I liked the picture, and my publisher, Dial, used it as the cover of my book, but Diane didn’t want her name used. She said it wasn’t the kind of image she was usually identified with.”
Krim says he hadn’t told Dial to pay her because she hadn’t wanted to be credited, but of course she wanted to be paid and she put up a fight until she got her $500. Krim says, “It seemed uncharacteristically hardboiled of her.”
In spite of poor health and continued bouts of depression, Diane began working again—doing fashion spreads for Bazaar (beautiful blurred shots of Mia Farrow in lingerie) and portraits of men like Eugene McCarthy for the London Sunday Times.
After an assignment Diane might spend hours in Allan’s darkroom, printing her work. She would move back and forth in the warm, charged darkness, uncorking solutions, filling the sink with water, dipping the negatives in, watching them bloom. Allan had taught her to print slowly and carefully, but she still couldn’t resist tearing the edge of a perfect print. Sometimes she would print an image over and over again and then hang various versions up to dry and come back to study them the next day.
Now each face she was photographing dominated the frame. “The Woman in the Veil on 5th Avenue,” “The Woman in the Fur Collar”—these are heroic portraits so textured they seem almost alive on paper. The way she was now handling light intensified her images, heightened their psychological drama. “She’d obviously learned a lot from Weegee and news photographs, from Lisette Model and from Cubism, too,” her old art teacher Victor D’Amico notes. “A left eye in one of the great Arbus portraits doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to the right eye—a left shoulder to a right shoulder… Some of her finest pictures remind me of the paintings she did at school, where parts of the body had an unresolved relationship to one another.”
Diane never showed these particular photographs to her goddaughter, May, when they were together that year—and she was seeing her as often as she could since May was living alone in the Village and “feeling very insecure.” Diane would draw her out about herself or talk in her rambling fashion about Doon and her free-lance magazine assignments—the complexities of mother-daughter relationships—the mysteries that exist between human beings—the many kinds of love. “She told me how close she and Allan were,” May says. “Closer than ever, although they were about to be divorced and he was thinking of marrying somebody else.”
Soon after that talk May sent Diane some poems. Her replying letter said it was important to realize one has to write a great many terrible poems before writing a good one, and that the same was true of photography. May found the letter encouraging “because she never told me what I’d written was too personal. She seemed to trust me to work through that to something else.” In another talk Diane told her goddaughter that “in all lives there are times when we seem to lose everything and have to start at ground zero again.” Recently she had reached ground zero and watched her “gorgeous mountain of life become a desert,” but it no longer frightened her “because you have to pay the price for your existence…it’s like trees lose their leaves in winter and new leaves flower in the spring—it’s the only way you can grow…”
Late that summer Bazaar flew Diane down to Atlanta to photograph Mrs. Martin Luther King still in mourning. James Earl Ray, King’s alleged assassin, had just been caught, but there was little talk of that as Diane snapped pictures of Mrs
. King standing serenely outside her home, hands clasped against her stomach, eyes raised to the skies. Diane couldn’t get over Mrs. King’s composure. Her mask would never come off—it was glued on tight! This whole business of deifying these famous widows—Jackie Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and now Coretta King… She was sure each one possessed some hidden trauma, if only she could bare it with her camera!
Ever since the “New Documents” show Diane’s phone had been ringing with requests for interviews. She was being asked to lecture around the country and to judge photography contests; photo journals were begging her to contribute. Then after the Viva pictures were published, her reputation as “a photographer of freaks” seemed to become even more of an established fact. She felt this was both exaggerated and incorrect, and it caused her great dismay. She would get defensive when anyone asked her questions about her method or choice of subject matter. She couldn’t answer specifically in any case, it wasn’t part of her nature—and most questions about photography were “terrifically boring” to her.
Now that she was no longer on antidepressants, her emotions were closer to the surface; she became easily irritated and cried a great deal. When she suddenly spoke contemptuously of a journalist she’d worked with, friends were surprised at her force; always before, she’d practiced such concealment. Jill Freedman, who later became known for photographing firemen in action, recalls how uninterested Diane was when she showed her her portfolio. “She offered absolutely no encouragement. She seemed to want to get rid of me fast.”
Another photography teacher and writer, Bill Jay, has an even more curious memory. He had come all the way from London to see Diane. He recalls going to her apartment on a very humid summer morning in 1968—“so humid I felt like a wrung-out dishrag.” When he rang the doorbell, a voice shouted, “Go away!” He kept ringing and the voice kept yelling, “Go away!” until he reminded her that they had an appointment. Eventually she let him in “after a lot of scuffling and unlocking and unbolting of the door.” And they faced each other.
“She was small and slim,” Jay remembers, “looking very energetic, and I guessed she could be extremely explosive—hot-tempered, even. She didn’t smile or observe the usual pleasantries.” Instead, as she mixed him a dish of some kind of cold jelly, she needled him with remarks such as “All photographers are boring—why should you want to see them? All magazines tell lies and yours is no exception.” The jelly prepared, she placed it in front of him and then straddled a bench so that her skirt rode up her thighs, revealing her panties—she either didn’t know or didn’t care. She glared at Jay belligerently watching while he took a mouthful of the jelly. “I thought I would vomit,” he says. “It was the most foul-tasting stuff I’d ever encountered, like a mixture of dishwashing liquid and gravy.” By this time he’d had enough, and he spat out a mouthful and told her angrily, “If I have any more, I’ll spew it all over your table!”
With that, Diane burst out laughing. “Now we can talk about photography,” she said. Jay doesn’t know whether he’d passed some bizarre test or what, but after that “she radically changed personality and was full of warmth and good humor.” Later she paved the way for him at the Museum of Modern Art with John Szarkowski. She also met him there to introduce him around; at one point she showed him a sheaf of strange photographs featuring genitalia. She said they were some of the best pictures she’d ever seen.
Sean Callahan had said that Diane often invited people to her apartment in order to “scrutinize them,” serving them strange concoctions and then waiting for their reactions. Yet when Lee Witkin (whose New York gallery was devoted exclusively to photography) was invited for an early breakfast, he was served an excellent plate of bacon and eggs. “Diane ate nothing, just watched me eat—stared at me without saying anything, which was a bit disconcerting. Finally I asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she answered, ‘You’re eating,’ and I said, ‘Well, sure I… What do you expect I’d be doing? You just served me breakfast,’ and she answered, ‘Most of them don’t eat.’
“Afterward she showed me a portfolio of her work and I did a terrible thing. When I saw the twins, I said off the top of my head, ‘I don’t see what all the excitement’s about.’ She didn’t explain or deny the statement, which was a stupid one. The twins is a great photograph, but you have to look at it for a while before it sinks in—it’s so personal.
“In spite of my idiotic remark, she allowed me to exhibit some of her pictures in late ‘69, but she wouldn’t let me overmat them, even though they’d ripple. I told her they should be matted so they’d look more like art objects, but she said she didn’t want them to look like art objects. I wanted to give her a show, but she was very reluctant, evasive, whenever I brought up the subject. I’d say, ‘Why not, Diane?’ and she’d never answer.
“Nobody bought her work while it was at the Witkin except for a young photographer named Bevan Davies, who saved his money and purchased two signed Arbuses [the Russian midgets and the pimply boy with the American flag]. They cost $150 apiece. These same photographs are now worth $4500 apiece.”
Davies, who was then in his twenties, says that when he saw the Arbus portraits he knew they were very important. “I couldn’t say why, I just knew they were, and that I had to own them. They were a big influence on me.”
Davies subsequently met Diane in Central Park. “I’d never seen her before, but I knew it was she from the way she was photographing—intensely concentrated, very intimate with her subjects.” He introduced himself, explaining how much he admired her, and she invited him to her apartment on East 10th Street. “Without her cameras she seemed introverted, self-conscious. She looked at my pictures, which were very derivative of her work…she told me that, while it wasn’t good to copy her, it was something every artist goes through before he evolves a style of his own. She was right.
“On another evening Diane took photographs of me—which I never saw, by the way. I remember we were walking down the street and suddenly she started shooting me and there was instant psychic communication between us. It was almost palpable. And I realized why she was such a great photographer. She was so disarming—she had this uncanny ability to relate to her subjects. She was very girlish—open, and interested in you. She asked very sharp questions, questions you couldn’t resist answering because they were questions you’d been secretly asking yourself.”
After he showed her work, Witkin says, “We never had any more long discussions about anything. She always seemed to be floating somewhere. She acted giggly, for instance, when she participated in a slide show with Gene Smith at the American Society of Magazine Photographers.”
Yet she spent hours at Witkin’s gallery when he exhibited Lewis Hine, the great slum photographer of the early 1900s. She told Witkin that she thought Hine was one of the great photographers, along with Sander and Weegee.
Weegee died in 1968, but Diane discovered that Wilma Wilcox, Weegee’s common-law wife, still lived in his dilapidated brownstone on West 57th Street. The house was crammed with junk. Diane began going through shopping bags full of negatives and prints, and she found all kinds of hitherto unpublished pictures. She told Witkin and he started coming to the brownstone, too. “Weegee was a consummate slob,” Witkin says. “It was a wild place.”
Weegee claimed to have covered five thousand murders, and though he turned squeamish at the sight of blood, he had been, to use his own words, “spellbound by the mystery of murder.” Diane would pore over his photographs. Many were discreetly distanced from the corpses, but Weegee always captured the horrified expressions on the faces of the onlookers.
In August, Mad magazine’s art director, John Putnam, ran into Diane near Bank Street, and they walked together for a while. “Diane and I often talked about France,” Putnam said. “She couldn’t get over the fact that I still spoke French like a native. Sometimes I’d translate Proust for her, or Charles Trenet lyrics. She told me she’d had a French nanny as a kid and had once believed she spoke French flue
ntly, but no longer could remember a word of it.”
That morning they strolled near the Hudson River docks, where they both photographed often, and they spoke of the Chicago riots. The newspapers and TV had been full of stories of the fires in Lincoln Park, the huge sleep-in, the confrontations between the hippies and police. This led to a free-wheeling and rather disjointed discussion about their own children and the sixties generation in general—most of whom, they decided, were into dope and rock and not believing anything. Putnam said he’d gotten exasperated by how “media was turning Vietnam into an event, not an aberration,” and with that Diane murmured, “People think our depravity is only temporary.”
He asked her if she regretted not being in Chicago to photograph the faces of the young—of the spaced-out, despairing radicals, the anarchists, the yippies in their beads and paint. And she answered no, she wanted to photograph blind people again. James Thurber. Helen Keller maybe. Borges. And she wished she could photograph Homer, if only he were still around. Poets were such a special breed, she said—so heroic. In the meantime she had lots of assignments; none of them particularly excited her, but she tried solving the problems she was having in her own projects with her magazine journalism. And as they were talking Putnam was struck by an “aura of aloneness” about her. She was really a solitary figure in photography, he thought, struggling intensely to turn grotesque and shocking subject matter into poetry. And she was working in such a paradoxical combination of styles (the snapshot, heroic portraiture) that the public felt threatened by her images. And nobody except possibly Marvin Israel and John Szarkowski understood or cared about what she was trying to do. Not until the 1980s would her style and content be called significant and a major influence in photography, and even then her work would still be sometimes compared to “a horror show.”
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