Diane Arbus (21 page)

She also took some lovely still-lifes of Cheech’s rocking chair and dressmaker’s mannequin. The light seemed to fall from nowhere, glancing off the rocking chair, before forming strange columns and then disappearing into the aqua-painted floor.

At Cheech’s apartment on Orchard Street the space had been so dim and mysterious, Diane had had difficulty taking pictures. On Orchard Street, Cheech had hung out with a band of gypsies—had, in fact, seen many of them through illness, even death. She always hungered for knowledge of every culture in the world, and felt she could learn only through friendship or love. So far she’d married a black man and a Chinese, but “it was a beginning,” she’d say. She seemed relaxed about the situation; she had plenty of time, since she was going to lead many lives after this one. She believed staunchly in reincarnation.

Recently she had convinced Diane that Elvis Presley had been a god in another life (“He was a Greek god—look at his curly mouth”). Together Cheech and Diane played Presley’s current hits “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” singing along with the frenzied crooning and the thrumming electric guitar—bouncing up and down (much to Allan’s annoyance), then collapsing into giggles on the floor.

It was this capacity for silly, childlike pleasure that drew the two women close. “We’d been best friends for ten years now,” Cheech says. “We planned to live together in our old age. Two dotty old ladies tending our plants.”

Once, when she was visiting Cheech in Spanish Harlem, Diane confided that she thought she might go crazy if she didn’t stop styling soon. Every time she returned to their fashion studio to work, she felt dragged down, confined, and her depressions increased in intensity, although she tried to hide them from Allan because
he
was working so hard and she loved him dearly and depended on him completely. At the studio she would address him teasingly as “swami” or “boy” (he still called her “girl”). But living and working with him in the same space—practically twenty-four hours a day—was getting to be a strain; there was so little time to dream.

And, as with everything she did, Diane was intensely concentrated as a stylist/photographer; depressed or not, she worked strenuously, throwing herself into each new assignment with fervor. She would spend hours choosing the right accessory; she might scour New York for days searching
for the perfect prop, whether it was a hundred red balloons or a particular breed of kitten. As a result, her collaboration with Allan on every sitting made them more and more successful as a team (they were now
Seventeen
magazine’s favorite cover photographers). But their work schedule was frenetic and suffocating; they started early and finished late, and neither of them was fulfilled by fashion photography. They viewed it simply as a way of making money.

How Diane longed to—just once—cut around or beneath a fashion image to get at the story behind that image, the fiction of it. As with the ravishingly beautiful model, married four times, whom she and Allan booked frequently even though the girl usually staggered into the studio black and blue from a lover’s beating. Diane would minister with coffee and ice packs on her arms and thighs, especially if they were shooting a bathing-suit spread. Between shots the model—who later, briefly, became a movie star—would sit in the dressing room moaning and studying her exquisite reflection in the brightly lit mirror.

Sometime in 1957 Diane inexplicably burst into tears at a dinner party when a friend asked her to describe her routine as a stylist at the studio. She, who rarely cried, who hated crying, began to sob as she ticked off her duties: fix model’s hair and makeup, accessorize her outfit with belt, necklace, earrings, hat, arrange the props just so. Since she hadn’t had much practice crying, the sobs seemed to have trouble coming from her throat. They were ugly, constricted cries. She would never again “style” the shots for a Diane and Allan Arbus fashion layout.

Soon afterward Allan phoned Alex Eliot and insisted that he and Jane come over “right away. We have something very important to tell you.” He sounded so urgent that the Eliots canceled their plans for the evening and rushed to the Arbus Studio. The minute Allan opened the door, he announced that Diane had made a dessert for everybody and that she had never made a dessert before; he seemed almost childishly pleased, since he had a sweet tooth that Diane had never catered to. “She had no real interest in food.”

The couples ate whatever it was, and then Allan explained why he’d summoned the Eliots. He and Diane had decided to break up their business partnership, he said, and they were going to start doing things independently of each other. He would continue to run the Diane and Allan Arbus studio (and the name would remain, since it was so well established), but he would also take a mime class from Etienne Decroux, which he’d always dreamed of doing. And Diane would have nothing more to do with styling or fashion photography. Instead, she would now be free to
wander around photographing whatever she liked. Although he didn’t say so, it was obvious he hoped this change would alleviate her recurring depressions.

The Eliots responded enthusiastically to the plan, particularly Alex, who had always maintained that Diane was potentially “a great artist—she can do anything she sets her mind to” and, although she kept denying it, the image of herself as an adventurer, a risk-taker, a “great sad artist” had been rolling around in her fantasies about herself since she was a kid. However, when Alex repeated, “You can do anything” that night, she looked a little frightened by the prospect of going out on her own and she said nothing because it was more than that—she had absolutely no idea how she was going to go about photographing anything and everything she wanted since she didn’t know precisely
what
she wanted to photograph.

Weeks passed and Diane wasn’t styling anymore—wasn’t doing much of anything. Jane dropped by and urged her to take her camera and go out on the street. “You owe it to yourself,” she said. Again Diane said nothing; she disliked talking personally—it wasn’t part of her nature. She couldn’t admit to Jane that she sometimes felt peculiar, not normal somehow, because her need to love and be cared for seemed to conflict directly with her need to photograph. What about her daughters? Would they get enough attention if she was out in the city with her camera? And Allan? What about her duties as his wife?

“Ma had always thought all her life was about helping Pa do his thing,” Amy Arbus said years later in a radio interview. “It took her a long time to adjust.”

For a while Diane went out every day and tried photographing strangers on the street. Her initial efforts were hampered by such extreme shyness that she enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s workshop at the New School to see if he could help her overcome her timidity. She knew that as an art director Brodovitch had made a special place for documentary photographers such as Brassai, Bill Brandt, and Lisette Model in the pages of
Harper’s Bazaar,
photographers she felt a special kinship for although she wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was because they were all portraitists who explored people’s roles. She knew as well that Brodovitch had encouraged fashion photographers like Penn and Avedon to be “serious.” (“I learned from his impatience, his dissatisfaction, his revolutionary eye,” Avedon has said.) However, once in the workshop, Diane discovered that Brodovitch—old, ailing, and suffering from extreme melancholia since all his possessions had been destroyed by a fire—had no interest in whether or not photographers were insecure. “He didn’t care if we were broke or had stomachaches,” Art Kane says. “His dictum was, ‘If you see
something you’ve seen before, don’t click the shutter.’ ” It was something Diane never forgot.

At the workshop the photographers would huddle around while Brodovitch went over different portfolios. He would hold up a picture and talk about its “shock impact,” its “showmanship,” its “surprise.” He could be vicious in his criticism; he rarely praised. Occasionally he would suggest that they all cut out a rectangular section from a piece of cardboard and use the framed space to take mental pictures of things until their ordinary way of seeing turned into a photographic way of seeing. “It was a remarkable discipline aimed at ending the division between formal and informal vision—a way of turning camera-users into cameras,” Owen Edwards wrote.

“Set yourself a problem—don’t shoot haphazardly!” Brodovitch would cry before giving out assignments. “Shoot the United Nations, traffic jams, graffiti, Dixie Cups—give the subject your personal interpretation.” For months the fledgling photographer Hiro photographed a shoe over and over again in a wild, imaginative variety of styles; finally Brodovitch told him he was ready to photograph for a magazine.

Eventually Diane stopped attending Brodovitch’s workshop. She told Yamashiro, who’d accompanied her, that she simply didn’t like the man, didn’t like the forbidding atmosphere he created around himself, didn’t like the abuse he heaped on his students, thought his approach was too monotonous, too narrow. He stressed visual coherence; she was interested in suggesting the mystery of existence, however unbearable, and in the deep, secret, interior lives of people. Brodovitch never mentioned secrets. But she left the workshop disturbed by one comment he made: “The life of a commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom can a photographer be productive for more than eight years.”

Now that she was freer, Diane began a study of photography back to the world’s first photograph: by Joseph Niepce, a view from the window of his blurred French garden circa 1826. (She used to tell John Putnam that she liked Balzac’s theory regarding the invention of the daguerreotype: that every human being in his natural state is made up of a series of superimposed images which the camera peels away.)

In time Diane would become familiar with the dreamy nineteenth-century portraiture of Julia Cameron, with Mathew Brady’s documentation of Civil War battlefields. She would read about Paul Strand’s switch from pictorialism to Cubist-inspired photographs in the 1920s; she would study Lewis Hine’s powerful pictures of children working in coal mines. Hine’s bleak images would impress her more than Stieglitz’ gorgeous
cloud formations. Stieglitz believed that photographs could be metaphorical equivalents of deep feelings. He also believed that the fine print, the excellently made photograph, was the criterion of a good photograph. Diane did not believe that. Which is why she responded to the work of her contemporaries Louis Faurer and Robert Frank, who were experimenting with outrageous cropping and out-of-focus imagery. But Diane was even more impressed by Lisette Model’s studies of grotesques, especially the grotesques of poverty and old age which she documented with almost clinical detachment.

*
“When we were breeding our dogs, Diane took pictures of the animals copulating. I was embarrassed,” Renée says. “Diane and Allan laughed at me.”

L
ISETTE
M
ODEL WAS SAID
to use the camera with her entire body; and her eyes—her eyes were “the most instinctive eyes in photography.” Model’s first pictures—massive portraits of French gamblers and the idle rich taken on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice—established her reputation when they were published in the New York newspaper
PM
in 1940 under the title “Why France Fell.”

These portraits, and others taken on Coney Island, were later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, and at the time (1941) they were considered revolutionary in terms of both their size (massive 16 x 20 prints, they loomed out at you from the frame) and their subject matter (drunks, filthy beggars, ordinary people, blown up to such heroic proportions you could almost feel their existence). Model called her subjects “extremes,” “exaggerations,” and they were—either very fat or very thin, very rich or very poor. Model knew the ugliness of the flesh and she refused to shrink from it.

The child of wealthy and cultivated parents, Model was born in Vienna in 1906. Her father, Victor Seybert (half Italian, half Austrian), had millions in Venetian real-estate holdings. Her French mother, Felicie, was ravishingly beautiful and dabbled in poetry. Model, one of three children, was raised mainly by servants in a huge mansion now designated as a national landmark by the Austrian government. Her closest friend was Trade Schoenberg, the daughter of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. One day Trade was visiting Model and watched horrified as a maid slipped on her shoes for her. “Can’t you tie your own shoes?” she asked Model, who answered airily, “I have a maid to do that for me.” “Tie
my
shoes for me, then,” Trade Schoenberg said. “Trade taught me to be more independent,” Model said.

Throughout her teens she spent much of her time in the Schoenbergs’ modest apartment. For the first time she saw a real artist struggling. “He’d been neglected by his peers, he couldn’t understand why Richard Strauss was being played and he wasn’t,” Model said. She thought he was
a man of utmost integrity, one who would never compromise. She went to concerts with him and studied music and harmony with him. “He thought I was exceptionally talented.”

In her twenties Model lived in Paris, where she studied singing and went into analysis. In 1936 she married Evsa Model, a Russian-Jewish painter living in Montparnasse. She became a photographer by chance. Sometime in 1938 she was painting—rather languidly—in Paris when a friend suggested that with the rise of Hitler she might be forced to earn her living; her family was part Jewish—and indeed their entire fortune was lost during the war. Although she had no experience with film, she decided to get a job as a darkroom technician. André Kertesz’s wife, Elizabeth, showed her how to use a Rolleiflex. The resulting portraits, taken at Nice, were her first experiments with a camera.

She came to New York in 1941 and became celebrated when her pictures were shown at the Modern Museum, praised by photographers like Ansel Adams and Walker Evans and by authorities like Beaumont Newhall.

“I was praised on the basis of a few test rolls of film—it was as if I was being put on a pedestal. Only in America… The most dangerous thing that can happen to an artist, making every beginner into a star, putting me onto a pedestal for something I didn’t even know what I was doing.” (When Edward Weston asked how she got such a grainy quality in her prints, she retorted that she had her film developed at a drugstore. “I hate pretty prints,” she said.)