Diane Arbus (42 page)

After work she and the Petersons did “touristy” things. They’d wander through the markets and shops in Kingston and at one of the shops Diane chose an album encrusted with shells. “I think I’ll buy this for Marvin,” she said. She wrote him a letter every day.

In the evenings they might go out to a nightclub. “Diane would put on an Yves Saint-Laurent dress and look smashing.” Usually she wore her “uniform” of cut-off jeans and sandals. She’d got very tan and her hair was cropped short as a boy’s.

At the end of their stay Diane and Pat went back to the market and came upon a little shop “where an artist had concocted these exquisite hand-painted crowns. He only had two left. We bought them, but we could tell he didn’t want to part with them both—his face screwed up with emotion as he packed them very tenderly for us in tissue paper. The next morning, driving to the airport, I had my crown on my lap (I still have it at home, and every time I see it I think of Diane). Suddenly I looked across at Diane and asked, ‘Where’s your crown?’ and she said, ‘I gave it back to the artist.’ Just the way she said it moved me to tears.”

When the Petersons, Diane, and Amy got back to New York, Allan was at the air terminal with his girlfriend, Mariclare Costello, to meet them. A few days later Diane wrote to the Petersons, telling them “how much the trip to Jamaica had meant to her and how wonderful we’d been to her and Amy and how she considered us her ‘family’ now.

“She wanted us to choose one of her photographs from the upcoming show at the museum and I said, ‘Sure,’ but I forgot, and a couple of weeks later Diane phoned and said, ‘You want one of my pictures, don’t you?’ She seemed hurt that I hadn’t chosen one immediately. So I ran over to the Charles Street house that very afternoon and I chose one of the nudist family and Diane signed it in her childish scrawl, ‘to Gus and Pat, love Diane Arbus.’ ”

“New Documents,” the photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened March 6, 1967, was probably the high point of Diane’s life.
Nothing indicates more clearly her excitement than the hundreds of announcements she sent out to friends and acquaintances on postcard-sized replicas of her portraits. She sent them to the Alex Eliots in Greece, to Pati Hill in France, to John Putnam, Phyllis Carton, Harold Hayes, Robert Benton, John A. Williams, Barbara Forst, Renee Philips, Joseph Mitchell, Larry Shainberg, Lucas Samaras, hairdresser and rock singer Monti Rockill, Mr. and Mrs. Gay Talese, and many others. All had individual handwritten messages. “I urge you to come,” she scrawled to photographer Irene Fay, and to her old English teacher Elbert Lenrow she added, “Do you remember me? Diane Nemerov—Fieldston—’39-’40?”

She talked to Grace Mayer about inviting pianists Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, Mr. & Mrs. Leonard Bernstein—“he recommended me for a Guggenheim… Eddie Carmel, he’s a Jewish giant I’m pursuing… Algernon Black, Ethical Culture…”

She passed out postcards as well—dropping one off at Tiger Morse’s Teeny Weeny boutique and leaving one for David, her hairdresser, and others for the Tom Morgans and Mary Frank. Geri Stutz, president of Bendel, recalls “Diane marching into my office and plunking the postcard down on my desk. She was grinning like a happy little kid.”

Opening night of the show it seemed as if everybody she knew in the art and photography worlds was there, including Emile de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the Pop Art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull. At Pat Peterson’s suggestion, Diane wore a white silk dress. Actress/photographer Roz Kelly,
*
who was there, says “Diane looked like an angel in the midst of a huge crowd.” She never stopped floating. Eventually she came drifting over to Kelly. “I’d like to photograph you,” she murmured. After a few moments she melted away in another direction. And much later a museum photographer captured her materializing ghost like from around a wall. She can be seen observing her brother Howard talking with Allan and Mariclare Costello.

Shortly after the opening the Bob Meserveys got a postcard emblazoned with Diane’s portrait of the identical twins. The message read: “Get to the Museum of Modern Art… Everything here is overwhelming… I go from laughter to tears.”

“For a while, she thought it was the greatest thing that had ever
happened,” Garry Winogrand says. “The ‘New Documents’ show meant everything to her.” He adds that he doesn’t think the show itself was so important, although it did suggest some of the pure potential of photography. “But it was more important because it introduced Diane Arbus to the world.” And, indeed, the lion’s share of attention, praise, and criticism was reserved for her thirty portraits of midgets, transvestites, and nudists, which were set off in a room by themselves, whereas Winogrand’s paradoxical groupings of people and animals shared a space with Lee Friedlander’s reflections in windows.

Crowds poured into the Arbus room and jostled one another in an effort to get close to the portrait of the lolling family of nudists. Elderly couples averted their eyes and often left hurriedly, murmuring, “Disgusting!” The critic Peter Bunnell believes that “what disturbed and disoriented people most was the pictures’ power to dominate.” John Szarkowski thinks “Diane’s images reminded us that we could fail.”

“Diane Arbus is the wizard of odds!” one critic blared, and another stated, “She caters to the peeping Tom in all of us.” Chauncey Howell in
Women’s Wear
called her eye “Grotesque.” Robert Hughes in
Time
said, “Arbus is highly gratifying,” while the
New York Times
described the Arbus vision as “bizarre…and it must be added in some cases that the pictures are in bad taste.”

Some of the most enthusiastic viewers turned out to be hippies from Haight-Ashbury and East Village dropouts in beads and long hair. Diane’s images didn’t threaten them; they had already begun responding to paradox and ambiguity and recognized in the grimacing Arbus faces—the languid expressions of the drag queen—elements of their own rebellion and extremism.

Response from the photographic community was strangely muted. “It was like what happened when Bob Frank’s
The Americans
was published,” Saul Leiter says. “There wasn’t much overt excitement, but the residual effect was enormous.” The “New Documents” show reshaped the documentary photographers’ approach through the 1970s. And Diane’s work had a profound effect; her way of photographing in square format with direct flash was copied by hundreds of photographers.

However, Emile de Antonio recalls that most of the art world “at least on opening night” was its usual judgmental, carping self. He believes that Diane was dismissed except by a few discerning souls who recognized her singularity. “Her subject matter was just too difficult for most people to confront.” But her “Man in Hair Curlers” and “Woman with a Cigar” went on looking out at the crowds “unflinchingly,” Max Kosloff writes, “as if not to countenance but to challenge the prurience of the photographic act.”

The psychological complexity of experiencing the Arbus photographs was acutely analyzed by Marion Magid in
Arts
magazine: “One does not look with impunity as anyone knows who has ever looked at the sleeping face of a familiar person and discovered its strangeness. Once having looked [at Arbus’ work] and not looked away we are implicated. When we have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator a transaction takes place between the photograph and the viewer. In a kind of healing process we are cured of our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for looking. In the end the great humanity of Diane Arbus’s art is to sanctify that privacy which she seemed at first to have violated.”

Immediately after the show opened, Diane gave an in-depth interview to Ann Ray, a
Newsweek
reporter. While they walked around the exhibit one afternoon, stopping to consider the portraits of midgets and angry kids, Diane confessed, “It impresses me terribly to have a show at the Museum of Modern Art; the show looks wonderful. It’s beautifully hung…but I would never have done it except for John Szarkowski. He’s wonderful.” Then she added, “I’ve spent the last eight years—which is how long I’ve devoted full time to my photography—exploring—daring—doing things I’d never done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child—going to circuses… sideshows…” But when pressed, she seemed reluctant to discuss her subjects or their situations except in general terms.

Ray noted that “Diane Arbus prides herself on getting people to open up their secrets,” and so felt an obligation to keep those secrets to herself. “I work from awkwardness,” Diane said. “Whereas Dick Avedon works from grace. By that I mean if I stand in front of something instead of arranging it, I arrange myself…it’s important to take bad pictures—it’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before…sometimes looking into a camera frame is like looking into a kaleidoscope and you shake it and sometimes it won’t shake out… I’m not virtuous…I can’t do anything I want. In fact, I can’t seem to do
anything
that I want. Except be a spy. I’ve captured people who’ve since died and people who will never look that way again… I’m clever… I don’t mean I can match wits with people ‘cuz I can’t. But I can figure myself into any situation. I choose photography projects that are somehow Mata Harish. I’ll not risk my life but I’ll risk my reputation or my virtue—but I don’t have so much left,” and she laughed. “Everyone suffers from the limitation of being only one person.”

She paused in front of her portrait of identical twins from Roselle, New Jersey, which perhaps better than any other of her images expresses the crux of her vision—the freakishness in normalcy, the normalcy in
freakishness. “I thought how ordinary is a charming pair of twins,” Diane murmured. “In some societies twins are taboo, an aberration.”

She paused again in front of her portrait of a peroxided, buxom burlesque comedienne seated in front of her cluttered dressing table. “She looks as if she’d stopped changing when burlesque died,” Diane said. “With her Betty Grable hairdo and her platform shoes.”

Asked if she deliberately distorted, Diane answered, “The process of photography is itself a bit of a distortion…but I’m not interested in distortion…you have to fuss with what you want and what the camera wants…the camera is so cold. I try to be as good as I can to make things even…the poetry, the irony, the fantasy, it’s all built in.”

She seemed pleased when told that some people likened her photographs to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, particularly her portrait of “The Widow” in an apartment crammed with gewgaws and
objets d’art.
“I love Cornell’s secrets—all those little secrets in little boxes—and I adore Steinberg and Pinter’s
Homecoming
because the play has such secrets in his use of language.”

Almost every day Diane came to the museum and moved through her exhibit, eavesdropping on the public’s reaction. She maintained, “I love what people say…one woman looked at the pictures and said, ‘I’d sure like to see the photographer, Diane Arbus,’ implying that anyone who takes such weird pictures has got to be weird herself. Like the man and wife who came in and the husband said, ‘This is great. I feel as if I know all these people,’ and the wife said, ‘You do?’ ”

But eventually she got tired of listening—most of the comments were derogatory: “strange,” “ugly,” “hateful,” “distorted,” “repulsive…”

She was told by friends that she had to develop an inner toughness, an indifference to people’s negative opinions of her work—a belief that the opinions of others were of concern to
them
and not to her. John Putnam quoted Gertrude Stein’s admonishment to Picasso: “All original art is irritating at first before it becomes acceptable to the public.”

She grew increasingly depressed. She didn’t really enjoy all the recognition; she liked to think of herself as someone who worked in private. Now the public and the art world had declared a stake in her career, and in the future everything would be done on display.

While the “New Documents” show was at the museum, she let John Gossage photograph her in Central Park. In the picture Diane is bundled up in a black quilted coat and a white turtleneck sweater, her Miniaflex camera with flash hanging around her neck. She confronts the lens with a look of utter desolation. After the session Gossage asked her how she felt and she answered, “Photographing is not about being comfortable, either for the photographer or the subject.”

One weekend she escaped to East Hampton to stay with Tina Fredericks. “Even though the water was freezing cold, she swam far out in the ocean,” Tina says. Her depression would not go away. She complained of being “dry and flat.” Nobody understood her pictures, she said. She’d been afraid of that—that she would be known simply as “the photographer of freaks.” It upset her that her motives were being misread. She was no more voyeuristic than any other photographer, nor was she “sicker” or “weirder.” It was just that she was more open, more honest, about her fascination with what society labeled “perverted” or “forbidden.”

As far as she was concerned, she simply wanted to take pictures of people whose faces and stories interested her. By now she had a stack of looseleaf notebooks dating back to 1959 which were crammed with brief accounts of hundreds of lives—romances, crises, disasters, jotted down in her nearly indecipherable scrawl. Nobody was identified by complete name because these were the secrets her eccentrics and her ordinary people had entrusted her with while she photographed them. Their stories never failed to excite her. She was thrilled, not only by what they had to say, but also by what they drew out of her. Because once they began talking to each other and she started clicking her camera, the gulfs that divided them—gulfs of race, age, expectation, craziness even—momentarily disappeared.

Collecting and exchanging secrets was a private bond between herself and her subjects; it was actually at the core of her work. Making something a secret was a way of giving it value. Secrecy kindled mystery and a belief in the sacred and it encouraged the distinctions and the connections between the midget and the Jewish Giant’s doomed yearnings.