Diane Arbus (47 page)

“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 Diane began going through shopping bags full of negatives and prints, and she found all kinds of hitherto unpublished pictures.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 fluently, 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.”

The last thing Putnam recalls Diane saying is that she was going on a story with Gail Sheehy to Queens; Sheehy was writing a piece for
New York
magazine on “The Important Order of Red Men,” a branch of the American Legion which consisted of former plumbers and druggists and bank clerks, all of whom dressed up in Indian feathers and brandished sequined tomahawks. The two women spent most of the day with the group, and Diane took a forceful portrait of a grinning man in a huge Indian headdress which was later part of her posthumous show at the Museum of Modern Art.

Afterward Diane and Sheehy had coffee and discussed their daughters and how emotionally insecure a mother alone could be. Sheehy had recently separated from her husband; Diane wanted to know how she coped with loneliness.

Diane’s life had grown increasingly lonely. Both Doon and Amy were busy and often away from the apartment, and since her most recent bout with hepatitis she didn’t always have the strength to see people, so she kept in touch by phone. She could talk on the phone for hours with Pati Hill or
Richard Avedon or Mariclare Costello, Allan’s girl. Sometimes she would see the Hollywood producer John Calley when he passed through New York. Calley was a brooding, handsome man nicknamed “the Dark Angel” by his colleagues. He had worked his way up from gas-station attendant to powerful studio executive (he ultimately headed Warners during the 1970s). Diane would visit him in the apartment in the East Seventies which he’d sublet and afterward they might have dinner with the screenwriter Buck Henry. Diane once brought along a portfolio of strange photographs of genitalia for the men to look at while they ate. It was the same batch of photographs she’d shown Bill Jay.

Occasionally she would photograph group sex parties. That was how she’d met poet/painter Stanley Fisher (now deceased), who’d participated in the “Doom, No!” and “Shit” shows at the Gertrude Stein gallery. (These garish art exhibits ridiculing a “plastic America” featured “the ultimate bowel movement” sculpture, as well as Fisher’s shocking collages, photographs of concentration-camp victims superimposed on Betty Grable’s nipples.)

Fisher’s main preoccupation was sex. He was at the time “master” to three young female “slaves” in a shabby but immaculate apartment on King Street. Diane went there to take pictures of Fisher, a former Brooklyn schoolteacher, handsome, blue-eyed, perpetually angry, sitting regally in a shabby old armchair railing against sexual repression in America. He had been in Reichian therapy, and believed that sex was the driving force in life; he would lecture obsessively about the need for frequent orgasms in order to stay healthy, and his female “slaves” (or “tribe,” as he called them) would hang on his every word—they never interrupted him except to go into the kitchen, where they would peel potatoes for dinner. If Fisher left the apartment (usually to make another “sexual conquest”), his “slaves” would follow him down the street, trotting behind him—out of deference, in homage.

Eventually Diane tried photographing Fisher orchestrating a group sex party and she was fascinated by his attempts to include everybody in such a mysterious act. She said later to a class, “The situation is both real and unreal and you have to deal with both…it’s all different kinds of theater… I mean the spanking…there’s a whole race of spanking people who are absolutely dotty about it.”

However, Diane did not think enough of her group-sex photographs to develop many of the negatives. Neil Selkirk, who has printed virtually all her work since her death, maintains that there are “no erotic pictures in her files” except for a set of contacts which include one image that Harold Hayes describes as “remarkable.” He saw it tacked on the wall in Diane’s Charles Street house, and he says, “It was of a couple fucking, and I’ll
never forget it because it was such a total expression of stasis, of detachment. The sexual act was all one saw, divorced from everything else.” (This particular image is listed in the Arbus catalogue and may still be available from the Arbus estate’s dealer, Harry Lunn, in Washington, D.C.)

Selkirk believes that this and one other picture (taken in a bondage house) are the only such Arbus pictures in existence. He believes that “a great many incorrect stories have circulated about Diane’s so-called pornographic pictures because she did photograph at some orgies. But obviously she didn’t think that the results were impressive enough to keep.” Selkirk goes on, “Diane would never limit herself to just the aberrant or sexual; she was interested in photographing a wide range of people and events.”

She would eventually tell fashion editor Carol Troy that she hoped to station herself inside Henri Bendel and “photograph a host of shoppers when things are ‘on sale.’ ” She wrote to Peter Crookston of her plan to photograph fat ladies and capture the psychological panic brought on by overeating; and possibly women who’d had plastic surgery, “if they’ll admit it.” And she wanted to photograph the Kronhausens—sex therapists who at the time had an open marriage; they ran a museum in San Francisco that featured their collection of erotic art. (The Kronhausens had given Diane the pictures of genitalia which she continued to show to everyone.) In late 1968 she was about to undertake a search for a couple who shared a
“folie à deux.”
She looked for this phenomenon in twins, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and a couple in a mental institution. For a while she considered the possibility of photographing schizophrenic patients under treatment by the controversial analyst R. D. Laing, whose existential theories were very popular during the sixties; he believed that no one can begin to think or feel or act except out of his alienation. Laing viewed schizophrenia as a valid experience—simply a negation of the negative experience of an alienated culture.

At Christmas, Diane flew to St. Croix with Pat Peterson to shoot another entire issue of children’s fashions for
The New York Times Magazine.
Once more her pictures of kids are blunt and unsentimental, and in some of them she seems, astonishingly, to reveal the shape of their faces as adults.

When she got back from St. Croix, she ran into Studs Terkel at a party. Terkel recalls: “I knew her brother Howard already—had interviewed him for my radio show in Chicago. I was starting to do a book on the 1930s Depression—
Hard Times,
it was later called—and I guess I told Diane
about it, and then she mentioned that her father had been a colorful character during the Depression—running Russeks, staying afloat during and after the Crash. And how she and Howard had grown up as rich kids isolated on Central Park West, and at the time she hadn’t been aware at all of the poverty, the bread lines. Which had bugged her in retrospect. So I decided I’d interview her for my book. She was called ‘Daisy Singer’ (most of the people I interviewed were given pseudonyms). But first we had lunch to get better acquainted.

“We went to a restaurant in the Village. Up close Diane looked like a little girl to me. Dressed in a leather miniskirt, I think. I remember indelibly—there was a sense of out of time about her, she wasn’t quite
there.
Even though she was warm and friendly and terribly vulnerable, she was never quite
there.
And she had so little self-esteem—I remember that about her, too. So many self-doubts. And she talked about men using her. Some Hollywood type. And a writer or a critic…”

Afterward they went to the Arbus studio on Washington Place and Terkel taped her for a couple of hours. He kept trying to get her to talk about the Depression, “but she kept getting sidetracked, recalling anecdotes about her family—her father and mother—and she talked about art and money and courage, not necessarily in that order. I asked few questions; it just kept pouring out.”

“My father was a kind of self-made man,” Diane told Terkel. “After he died I found in his drawer—along with his condoms—a credo of ten things he wanted to achieve. One was to make a million dollars. My brother pointed out that for a man who had his heart set on being rich, what he achieved was totally inadequate. My brother pointed out also that while we were rich, my father was a gambler and something of a phony. That he could always appear richer than he was. His friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant of them and in a sense he made what he made go a long way. It was a front. My father was a frontal person. A front had to be maintained…in business if people smell failure, you’ve had it. I’ve learned to lie as a photographer, Studs. There are times when I come to work in certain guises, pretend to be poorer than I am—acting, looking poor.”

She continued: “I always had governesses. I had one I really loved until I was seven and then I had a succession of ones I really loathed. I remember going with this governess that I loved—liked—to the park to the site of the reservoir which had been drained; it was just a cavity and there was this shanty town there. For years I couldn’t get anyone to remember this, but finally someone at the Museum of the City of New York said yes, there was this shanty town. This image wasn’t concrete, but for me it was a
potent memory. Seeing the other side of the tracks holding the hand of one’s governess. For years I felt exempt. I grew up exempt and immune from circumstance. That idea that I couldn’t wander down…and that there is such a gulf. I keep learning this over and over again…the difference between rich people and poor people. I’m fascinated with how people begin because it influences their attitudes about money and everything else…

“[My brother and I] never went far afield…the outside world was so far. Not evil, but the doors were simply shut. You were never expected to encounter it. For so long I lived as if there was contagion. I guess you would call it innocence, but I wouldn’t call it pretty at all…

“I grew up thinking all my minimal conjecture was true. I thought I’d been born knowledgeable; that what I knew came from beyond the grave. I mean before birth. I didn’t want to give up that wisdom for the ordinary knowledge of experience, which is the way I confirmed the way my parents brought me up, which is the less you experience, the better. You know what I mean? I’m accusative…what I mean is my mother never taught me courage and I don’t mean to accuse her—parents only teach by default. What I learned was, if you were weak—if you didn’t know something—all you had to do was confess it and then it would be all right—that’s what femininity constituted in that time, and you found a man to take care of you in exchange for being taken care of. You see, I never suffered from adversity… I was confirmed in a sense of unreality.