Authors: Patricia Bosworth
When
Journal of the Fictive Life
was published, Diane ignored Howard’s ruminations on photography, but she read the rest of it. What struck her was the sameness of their childhood memories. “We had the same lexicon,” she said. Howard could not forget the sensation he’d had as a little boy of going into the “windowless elevator hall [of the San Remo apartment house]…very sinister, with its closed doors on two sides, its closed sliding door on the third. It represented a final loneliness (waiting for the elevator on the way to school?).”
Diane remembered the elevator man “who became a peculiar clue to [what went on in real life]. He used to stop between floors and be rather flirtatious with me and I would sort of look at him…he was sort of lascivious, I mean he never did anything wrong but he made me feel trapped, made me feel aware; [when you’re growing up] you operate on little hints like that because that’s all you have to go on and in a way you construct the world on these terribly minimal bits of evidence. Which may not be far from wrong.”
Diane kept in touch with Emile de Antonio, who was completing his first film,
Point of Order,
about the McCarthy hearings. He had been able to make the documentary, he told Diane, because he’d found 185 hours of the Congressional hearings stashed away in a New Jersey warehouse and had managed to buy the footage for $50,000. He told her everything about it when she visited him at his apartment on East 95th Street, where, De says, she seemed quiet and more contained. “She always seemed sad, but she had this internal grace.” At the Charles Street house she appeared to
him to be under more pressure, giggling and trying to be the perfect mother to her daughters. She told De she was worried about Doon, who was restless; and Amy was having a weight problem…
But by herself Diane relaxed. At this time she was experimenting with cameras, borrowing from Hiro or renting cameras, even taking the same picture with different cameras. She still missed the lightness of her Leica, but knew the Rollei was better for her. Sometime in 1964 she began alternating with a Mamiya C33 with flash, which was a crucial change. Her subjects took on a stranger, more powerful life. The illumination of the flash not only stripped away artifice and pretense, it revealed another, deeper level—a sense of psychological malaise.
She talked about her camera experiments, but, De recalls, “I probably ended up talking more. She was very private. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to totally capture her—she seemed so evanescent.” She reminded De of Dick Bellamy, who was also an extraordinarily private and self-contained person—“possibly that’s why Diane and Dick had such an affinity.” She would visit Bellamy occasionally at his Green Gallery, which he was making into a center for Pop Art—Jim Dine, Frank Stella, Roy Linquist, were all shown there. George Segal, too. His immobile plaster figures represented terror, hallucinations, nightmares to Diane. She related to them the way she related to the wax figures in the Coney Island museum.
She would visit Bellamy periodically, and she would visit Alice Glazer, the high-strung, overly conscientious
Esquire
editor, who eventually killed herself. Whenever Harold Hayes called an article meeting Alice would call Diane in a panic and Diane would come to Alice’s office and give her ideas. On her way home she might stop at Lord and Taylor and go up and down the escalators, studying the customers’ faces. “I know a lot about shoppers,” she’d say. Then she’d hop the Fifth Avenue bus to the Village, taking pictures of the passengers and sometimes using the flash. It didn’t seem to matter to her that many of the passengers complained or flinched, or were blinded by its glare. Everybody seemed raw and open to her.
B
Y THE MID-SIXTIES
D
IANE
had become a familiar figure to most working photographers in New York City. She was seen everywhere—at art openings, at happenings, at the Judson Memorial Church, at Pop Art collector Ethel Scull’s party held at a Nathan’s hot-dog stand, at Tiger Morse’s fashion show, which took place at the Henry Hudson Health Club with stoned models showing off lingerie, then falling into the pool. “Diane was at every spectacle, every parade,” Bob Adelman says, “right up to the Gay Rights Liberation March of 1970.”
Adelman, who eloquently documented the civil-rights movement in the pages of
Look
magazine, recalls seeing Diane at “most of the protests against the Vietnam war. But she would never plunge into the crowd like the rest of us who were all going for a sense of
immediacy,
of grabbing on to the entire vista—we wanted to record the action. But Diane hung back on the fringes—and she’d pick out one face, like the pimply guy with the flag or the man with his hat over his heart.”
On assignment, in competition with other (mostly male) photographers, Diane could turn colder or more aggressive. Sometimes at an art opening or press conference she would hop about almost manically, click-clicking away at people until they’d run through their repertoire of public faces and stood exposed and blinking under the glare of her flash. “She used to drive people crazy at parties,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She’d behave like the first paparazzi. She didn’t talk much, but she’d swoop like a vulture at somebody and then blaze away. And she would wait outside a place for hours in any kind of weather to get the kind of picture she wanted.”
Sometimes it seemed as if every event in the sixties had been organized for the benefit of TV and still photographers. The media were creating a turbulent new world, based not on wealth and achievement but on being promotable (“Everybody can be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol predicted). So photographers were involved as never before in recording all this voracious hunger for publicity, for notoriety. Sometimes dozens of
them would compete for a single image: at Truman Capote’s party for Katharine Graham, photographers went crazy as to whom to photograph first—Margaret Truman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, Henry Ford… But once again Diane would avoid the obvious image—the costume, the behavior, the visible effect—and would zero in close-up on a mismatched couple. The main detail, the woman’s pale, broad, freckled back.
She knew she had an advantage on the job in the company of men. In the beginning she was ignored, but even after she got better known she could still get away with a lot of things a man couldn’t. She’d appear insecure about her equipment; she couldn’t always load film into a camera; she’d flirt. “I’d stop at nothing to get the picture I wanted,” she told one of her students, Mark Haven. “And being a woman helped.”
She could usually sell most of the pictures she took, but she would refuse credit if the image didn’t come up to her standards. She was out to make a personal statement, no matter what the circumstances or assignment—she wished to be compared with no one, but to be better than the best. If she had a need to exaggerate the physical and psychological horror in her subjects, it was because she saw that beyond these exaggerations might lie transcendental worlds of absolute value. She would always go on exploring the question of identity versus illusion in her photography.
You see both in her ghostly, voluptuously daydreaming portrait of the ravaged former debutante Brenda Frazier taken for
Esquire
(“Frazier and I talked about nail polish,” Diane told John Putnam). When she photographed the Armando Orsinis, the Frederick Eberstadts, the John Gruens for a “Fashionable Couples” series in
Bazaar,
she insisted that they hold the same pose for up to six hours until, exhausted, they all revealed a terrifying sense of mutual dependency.
And she kept on scrutinizing the stoic self-sufficiency inherent in her subjects, as with the portrait she took of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in
Esquire’s
editorial offices. She had only a half-hour. Mrs. Oswald was there to sell her son’s letters to the magazine. “She was peddling all the artifacts she had,” Diane said. “And not only that, she was incredibly proud—like she had done the most terrific thing in the world…she looked like a practical nurse…and she was smiling—it seemed unnatural. Why was she smiling? What did she have to be so pleased about? We talked a little. She was dying to talk, you know? In fact, this was her big moment. [Her son had assassinated President Kennedy] and it was as if he had done something remarkable and she looked as if she’d manipulated the whole thing for forty years since she conceived him. She had this incredible look of authority, of pride.”
As Diane grew more confident, the subject matter in her own work grew more extreme. Her constant journeys into the world of transvestites, drag queens, hermaphrodites, and transsexuals may have helped define her view of what it means to experience sexual conflict. She once followed “two friends” from street to apartment, and the resulting portrait suggests an almost sinister sexual power between these mannish females. (The larger, more traditionally feminine figure stands with her arm possessively around the shoulder of her boyish partner. In another shot the couple is seen lying on their rumpled bed; one of them is in the middle of a sneeze—it is both intimate and creepy.)
Diane also photographed drag queens in their seedy little rooms at the Hotel Seventeen near Stuyvesant Park, and she spent a day with a transvestite at the World’s Fair in Flushing; they had an attack of giggling when he/she didn’t know whether to use the ladies’ or the men’s room.
Lately Diane had become friendly with “Vicki,” a huge, six-foot man who was a hooker; Vicki called himself “Vicki Strasberg” (after Susan Strasberg). Vicki took hormones and gorged on food so “she” would be plumper and more sexually desirable; she always dressed as a woman and whored as a woman, and supposedly no customer ever complained. Wherever they went, everybody ogled Vicki. She had “the most unbelievable walk,” Diane recalled. “I couldn’t see the man in her.”
Vicki was dangerous, mean. She knew how to use a knife and she tortured her cats and once she stabbed a customer and was sent to the Tombs. Vicki adored Diane and gave her presents (which she’d stolen from department stores) and invited her to her birthday party at her hotel at Broadway and 100th Street. “The lobby was like Hades,” Diane recalled. “People lounging around; the whites of their eyes were purple.” A stench, a congealment, a heaviness pervaded the place, and the carpet was littered with broken syringes and orange peels. The elevator didn’t work, so Diane climbed the stairs, stepping over inert figures on each landing. She arrived at Vicki’s shabby room carrying a birthday cake and Vicki was waiting for her; she’d attempted to decorate a little, but the balloons she’d bought were sticking to the wall and to the bureau instead of floating in the air as she’d planned. For a few moments Diane wondered where Vicki’s other friends might be and then she realized she was the only guest at the party. After a while she took photographs of Vicki semi-toothless and laughing on her bed, exposing her huge thighs. Near her balloon remains stuck on the side of the bureau.
Nobody would buy Diane’s portraits of drag queens at first. “In the early sixties drag queens were sociosexual phenomena,” Andy Warhol writes. He thinks Arbus was ahead of her time in terms of photographing them, because “drag queens weren’t even accepted in freak circles until
1967.” In the meantime, the more she photographed transvestites, the more she connected their sexual identity with “nature,” “personality,” and “style.” To a transvestite, sexual identity seemed to be more a predilection than a necessity of gender.
Finally, when Diane photographed the man in curlers and the woman smoking a cigar, she was able to capture the confusion of male and female identities trapped in a single personality.
Occasionally Diane would show some of her latest work prints of transvestites to Walker Evans. He also liked the portrait of Norman Mailer, which she’d taken for the
New York Times.
In this picture Mailer is clutching his crotch. “You actually get a sense of what it’s like to
be
Norman,” Evans told his wife later. (As for Mailer, he commented, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.”)
Evans was extremely pleased by Diane’s progress. He wrote: “This artist is daring, extremely gifted, and a born huntress. There may be something naive about her work if there is anything naive about the devil… Arbus’ style is all in her subject matter. Her camera technique simply stops at a kind of automatic, seemingly effortless competence. That doesn’t matter: we are satisfied to have her make her own photography speak clearly. Her distinction is in her eye, which is often an eye for the grotesque and gamey; an eye cultivated just for this to show you fear in a handful of dust.” He urged her to keep showing her latest pictures to John Szarkowski, the new head of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art.
Szarkowski had already seen Diane’s early work done in 35 millimeter (the eccentrics, Puerto Rican kids), but he hadn’t liked it very much because “they weren’t pictures somehow.” However, he’d been impressed by Diane’s elegance, her high intelligence, and her ambition… “there was something untouchable about that ambition.”
They became friends and she continued to bring stacks of work prints to his office at the museum, and as she began photographing more at contests and parties and in the street—almost always using her flash—her rough, uneasy style evolved and then her subjects began alternating between freaks and eccentrics and the frankly middle-class, all posed in the same grave, troubling manner. By 1964 she was really collaborating with the people she photographed—collaborating and confronting them as she hunted for their private faces. However, her central concern remained unwavering—it focused on the nature of being alone and our pitiful range of attempted defenses against it. Szarkowski realized that “Diane was a marvelous photographer—nobody else photographed the
way she did. Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality.” On top of that she was running totally counter to the 1930s-’40s documentary photographers, who had tended to be almost benevolent to their subject matter and serene in their technique. Like Robert Frank’s, Diane’s attitude toward her camera was raw and unsettling. Szarkowski began re-examining his own definitions of documentary photography.