She talked about photographing Bennett Cerf and “mucking it up.” She had come back to his office a second time, even though she didn’t think it would work a second time if it hadn’t worked the first. “And Cerf presented his face to me from behind his newspaper and…it was like his ass because it was so round and blank.” Famous people reminded Diane of “postage stamps. You know their faces but you don’t know them…if you see a movie star on the street, you want to go up and pinch their cheek.”
She said she once went to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s house in Westport and they looked “like they had lightbulbs inside them. Radiant with health—movie stars got this health thing faster than (the rest of us).”
She spoke of photography as “an adventure.” And then in an aside she commented, “Someone once defined horror for me as the relationship between sex and death.
“Choosing a project can be ironic,” she went on. “Everybody’s got irony. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the structure, the detail, the significance… What I mean is, I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
“[As a photographer] there are two feelings in you. One is you really want to get closer [to the image]. The other thing is that you’ve got some edge…you’re carrying some slight magic which fixes [the subject] in some way.”
She urged the class to “photograph something real…that’s fantasy. Where fantasy comes from is the reality. The fantasy is [total], it really is. It is totally fantastic that we look [the way we do], and sometimes you see that very clearly in a picture. Because it’s so real, it’s fantastic—not that it’s so fantastic that it’s real. Reality is reality, and if you scrutinize reality close enough, you really, really get to it. It’s fantastic. You have to use the term reality to represent what really is in front of the camera. What I’m saying is, let’s call reality reality and let’s call dreams dreams.”
In class she kept stressing the factual, the literal, the specificity inherent in photography. She loved Bill Dane’s postcard photographs of American landscapes. She encouraged Bruce Weber (who became celebrated in the 1980s with his beautiful, stately photographs of Calvin Klein underwear for men). At the same time Diane could not respond to Ralph Gibson’s multiple images and she told him so when he asked her to recommend him for a Guggenheim.
She showed the class a few of her pictures—like the angry little boy holding the hand grenade—but, according to one student, “Diane never actually explained how she got those images or how she convinced so many weird people to pose for her.”
She referred to her most recent experiences photographing at a home for retardates, and she described attending a dance at the home and watching an incredibly heart-stopping handicapped couple dance—he was tall and skinny and his girl was tiny and radiant with “red hair like Maureen O’Hara.” Diane herself had danced with a sixty-year-old handicapped man who was very shy and spoke like a six-year-old boy.
She took many photographs at the retardates’ home, but she insisted, “I’ve never taken a picture I intended. They’re always better or worse.”
She went on to say, “A photograph has to be specific. I remember Lisette Model telling me, ‘The more specific you are, the more general you’ll be.’ ”
She ended one class with the thought: “When you get confused, look [away] from your pictures. Look out the window. Because somehow the reality is the act of making a picture yourself.
“I can tell you a picture. We’re all verbal and visual; it’s all open to us.”
Between classes Diane spent a great deal of time at the Walker Evans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She’d been so anxious to see it that she, Avedon, Marvin Israel, and Jim Dine had sneaked in while the show was being hung in early January of 1971, and they had wandered around “in great spirits,” stopping to savor particular photographs that inspired them. As usual, Diane was also juggling a variety of assignments: photographing Cliff Gorman as Lenny Bruce for Vogue, photographing Hortense Calisher for her new book (but Calisher hated the portrait and asked that it be destroyed). She also flew to Detroit to photograph the controversial black separatist minister Albert Cleage for Essence magazine, and she caught him with just a touch of a smirk on his mouth. Cleage liked the portrait so much that it now hangs in the meeting hall of his new church in Houston. The rest of Diane’s days were taken up completing a series for Time-Life Books. “It’s about love,” she said.
She photographed a bridal fashion show and girls trying on their gowns for their mothers and fiancés; she photographed a homosexual couple, but the culmination of the project came when she heard about a New Jersey housewife who was particularly devoted to her pet monkey, Sam. Sam was a baby macaque, and the housewife kept him dressed in bonnet and snowsui? so that he resembled a tiny, ancient-faced baby. Diane used an electronic flash placed close to the camera to create harsh shadows, but there is a halo effect above the housewife’s head. She called the resulting portrait “Madonna and Child.”
By simulating amateur-snapshot techniques, she hoped to catch the “total ordinariness” of the backgrounds. Many of her pictures dissatisfied her because “the woman was cooing or eager or nervous,” but the monkey picture she thought was right. It had the effect of looking like a father’s snapshot of his wife and child, emphasized by the housewife, who, according to Diane, “was extremely serious and grave holding her monkey, the same way you’d be grave about the safety of a child.”
Whenever she could find the time, Diane would go to her new darkroom located in a basement on Charles Street. It was totally quiet there and very well organized—all her pictures filed from one to a thousand, and she would print from six a.m. till noon if she could. She was making up a series of prints for a portfolio—a limited edition of fifty portfolios in which twelve of her best portraits (among them the nudist family and the twins) would be signed and annotated by her and displayed “in a nearly invisible glass box designed by Marvin Israel.” She hoped to sell the portfolio’s to museums and private collectors for $1000 apiece.*
She was also developing and printing more retardate pictures from Vineland. She kept going back to the home and staying there as long as she could before returning with fresh rolls of film. The images excited and disturbed her every time they came swimming into the enlarger. By now she had enough pictures for a book, but she felt ambivalent about a book, just as she felt ambivalent about another show, although she didn’t say that to T. Hartwell when he visited her at Westbeth; he sat on the floor of her apartment for an entire afternoon while she showed him a batch of the retardate pictures—like the old woman in the wheelchair wearing a plastic mask and holding a Halloween candy bag in her lap. “Diane was obviously very moved by these pictures. ‘These people are so angelic,’ she kept telling me.” Hartwell says he was moved by the pictures, too, because even in her most anguished probing there was complete artistic control. “As always, Diane took you ‘inside’ and you got a distinct sense of what these characters were about.” Once again Hartwell urged her to consider a one-woman show in Minneapolis—she was ready for it, he said. And she seemed almost to agree, although they set no date.
She could not tell him her true feelings: that if there was a book of her work, or another exhibit, her life would be “over.” That would be it. Somehow, for her work to live—to flourish, to grow—it could not be contained between pages or hung on walls where it would be judged, scrutinized, interpreted by strangers. She preferred to give her work to friends—to Nancy Grossman, Harold Hayes, Robert Benton, Tina Fredericks, Peter Crookston, Bea Feitler, Richard Avedon.
Her friends accepted the powerful instability in her pictures—the disorienting light, the atmosphere of psychological crisis. One of her last portraits is also one of her greatest: an “albino sword-swallower” stands in front of a flapping carnival tent performing her act. Her arms are stretched out like Christ on the cross, but her head is thrown back so
triumphantly you can almost feel the sharpness of the blade sliding down her throat. The image is grotesque and defiantly spiritual.
In her last class Diane spoke of the French photographer Brassaï and his shadowy images of whores and late-night cafés in Paris. “Brassaï taught me something about obscurity, because for years I’ve been hipped on clarity,” she said. “Lately it’s been striking me how I really love what I can’t see in a photograph. In Brassaï, in Bill Brandt, there is the element of actual physical darkness and it’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”
After her final lecture Diane invited her students to her duplex for a party. Lisette Model was there, too, and Diane seemed particularly proud to have her teacher present. Everyone wandered around, intrigued by the apartment. The rooms were light, airy, sparsely furnished. Green, leafy plants flowered in one corner and voluminous cheesecloth curtains billowed out from the windows; a strong breeze blowing in from the Hudson River made the material flap and flutter. Someone noticed sharp prickles or mirrored chips embedded in the furs and animal skins draped across a huge bed set up on a platform. Someone else noticed black satin sheets covering the mattress; Avedon’s portrait of Eisenhower stood on a table, and propped against a wall was a blow-up of what appeared to be people with their guts hanging out. Ruth Ansel assumed it might be something from the Daily News files. “What is it?” she demanded. Diane’s only answer was, “I like it. It’s terrific. Don’t you think it’s terrific?”
Toward the end of the party one of the students, Mark Haven, phoned to explain why he wasn’t there—his wife had just had a baby. Diane asked all suits of questions: Did she go through natural childbirth? Did he take pictures while she was in labor? Then she launched into a rambling monologue about the joys of natural childbirth until Haven interrupted to thank her for the photograph she’d sent him from the National Enquirer. It was of a girl holding a doll giving birth to another doll—a really weird image—and although Diane hadn’t enclosed a note, he’d known it was from her. She now admitted it was; she read the National Enquirer avidly—there were always things in it to laugh about: wild UFO stories, grisly murders, strange baby tales, “Gee Whiz” emotion stuff like the “neon cow” that had supposedly been zapped by an eerie substance from the sky. Diane told Haven that she occasionally got ideas from the Enquirer for pictures. Once, in fact, she described her own style of photography as “funk and news.”
* The resulting portrait of the Mansfields appeared in the October 1969 issue of Harper’s and Diane sold the picture to other publications. “It was seen all over the world,” Mansfield claims. “We thought it was undignified.”
It was, however, consistent with many of Diane’s finest portraits: a couple in extremis, if you will; middle-aged, paunchy, oily in bathing suits, presented in sweetly prosaic terms. Diane could not and did not accept all her subjects with grace. If she couldn’t respond, her reaction was often severe.
* Amy Arbus said later, “My mother was frightened by the idea of a book, she rejected it every time. She hated the finality of it. She thought once she [published a book], that would be it, kind of.”
* Only three portfolios were sold: to Richard Avedon, Jasper Johns, and Bea Feitler. Bea received an eleventh picture as a gift. Inscribed “especially for B.F.,” it is from Diane’s series on “love objects” for Time-Life Books—the portrait of the housewife with her pet monkey.
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IN THE SPRING OF 1971 there was a rape at Westbeth, followed by two suicides. A woman came off the street, climbed up onto the roof, and jumped. Her body lay uncovered and unclaimed for almost a day in the Westbeth courtyard, and many residents and their children were forced to view the corpse.
Then a photographer, Shelley Broday, jumped from the roof. He’d been drinking a lot and taking pills. Not long after that suicide Thalia Seltz told Diane that she was concerned because her kids were starting to compose songs about people they knew who’d killed themselves—she thought she ought to take them away from Westbeth, and ultimately she did move. Diane replied that she had been surprised about Broday “because Shelley didn’t seem like the suicidal type.” And then she added, “Frankly, honestly, I’ve thought about suicide, too, but then I’ve thought about my work, and my work is what matters—I couldn’t stop my work.” But Seltz says Diane didn’t sound convincing—she seemed very depressed.
Lately she had been going to the movies early in the day. A Fieldston classmate recognized her at the 68th Street Playhouse. “It was two in the afternoon—the lights had just come up because the film was over and there was Diane slumped in her seat across from me. She looked spooked, bedraggled. I had the impulse to go over to her and say, ‘Are you okay?’ but I was very depressed myself, so instead I hurried up the aisle and out onto the street. I don’t think she ever saw me.”
Usually Diane forced herself to keep on the move. She would drop by the Bazaar art department to gossip with Bea and Ruth, or she would go over to Esquire to sit in Harold Hayes’ office, and Sam Antupit, who was then art-directing the magazine, would give her “easy jobs because she seemed very frail—very vulnerable. Like I sent her to Boston to photograph Mel Lyman, the hippie leader who answered to the name of ‘God.’ ”
She still took great glee in certain assignments, particularly in photographing Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House on June 11, 1971, for the London Sunday Times. She told Crookston, “The press tent…the size of an airplane hanger…as for the ceremony itself, guests like movie extras, and a man with a trumpet and 50 of the photographers straining against the ropes and Secret Service and the Pres and the Mrs. and the Cox family incredibly hometown…illuminated sort of unearthly by the TV lights…it was like a midwestern celebration…endearing exaggerated. The President looks like he wears makeup.”
As soon as she got home from an assignment—from anything—she would shut herself in her apartment and pick up the phone. The phone was like an anchor—and she could keep in touch with an amazing range of people that way, from police chiefs and morgue assistants to John Szarkowski or her brother, Howard, now teaching at Washington University. She spent hours on the phone with Richard Avedon. And she kept in touch with Allan, who’d just got a lead in Robert Downey’s Greaser’s Palace, his biggest movie break. He would be playing a zoot-suiter Christ figure, first seen descending to earth in a striped helium balloon.
Diane also called Alex Eliot. He and Jane were planning to move back permanently to the States and would be living in Sam Eliot’s old house in Northampton, Massachusetts, right next door to President Grover Cleveland’s summer mansion. And Jane would be planting organic vegetables and baking flat bread and Alex would dress in flowing robes and sandals; his gray hair now touched his shoulders. He was thinking about writing a book which he would eventually call Zen Edge, in which his thoughts on Buddhism and meditation would be mixed up with memories of New York in the forties and Europe and Time Inc. His meeting with Diane during the spring of 1971 would ultimately be included in the manuscript—when they talked of their children: of May, who would soon become a teacher; of Doon, who was in Paris, and Amy in a New England boardingschool…
It was about four in the afternoon and gloom seemed to have descended into the duplex. Alex reminded Diane that once long ago, when they were teen-agers at the Cummington graveyard, she had written in the palm of his hand with a fountain pen. “What did I write?” she demanded, and before he could answer, she said, “Bone. I wrote ‘bone’ in your hand. You were talking so much that day it sounded like a crying of bones. I was sad. Our bodies must have been unquiet.” Her face glowed silver and distant in the dusk, Alex writes. He remembered when he had called her “Moon.” Now the face appeared to waver, full of hollows, dimly glittering. Alex adds that suddenly he found himself wondering what in God’s name are we all looking for in life?
Diane murmured back as if he’d posed the question (but he hadn’t), “Not childhood. There’s something else we’re looking for—something we’re not consci
ous of as yet, although it may be here already.” And then she spoke of her “monumental blues.”
To her friends she was referring more specifically to her “blues,” her depressions. After almost two years in therapy she seemed more communicative on a personal level, and she’d relaxed. She didn’t converse in what some people called brittle cocktail chatter. She didn’t perform—or refer to her adventures as if she was talking about another person. She’d begun alluding to a deep anxiety—a terror over her increasing responsibilities. Walker Evans had asked her to teach photography at Yale—wanted her to start in the fall of ‘71 (she turned him down). And Walter Hopps, the astute young curator of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, had got her to agree to exhibit her work at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1972. It was unprecedented—no photographer had ever been so honored—but Hopps believed that “Arbus was a central and crucial figure in the Renaissance of still photography—absolutely uncompromising in her vision…her importance stemmed from the fact that in style and approach she was radically purifying the photographic image.”
Whenever she mentioned Yale or Venice, Diane would fall into wild crying. What did people expect of her? she would sob. She had nothing to give. Nothing! she kept repeating. Why were all these things happening to her? She didn’t deserve them, didn’t want them. On top of everything else, the May issue of Art Forum, usually devoted to abstract art, had published a portfolio of her pictures and they had created quite a stir in the art world. Suddenly painters and sculptors were noticing her—getting excited by her images—possibly because photographs like the Jewish Giant or the twins had such a metaphorical life apart from being very documentary.
Still, Diane maintained, she couldn’t understand why anyone would be impressed with her work. She kept denying that it had value, except possibly to her. She sensed that the work was being noticed for the wrong reasons (“Her name was rapidly acquiring a semi-mythic status our culture confers on artists who specialize in extreme unfamiliar experiences,” Hilton Kramer has written). She was certain she would always be known as “the photographer of freaks” and she resented that label because she felt that, at their best, her portraits suggested the secret experiences that are within all of us.
Diane Arbus Page 41
