Diane Arbus (40 page)

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.