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MEIR RONNEN:
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The Velazquez of New York

"…a thing is not seen because
it is visible, but conversely,
is visible because it is seen…"

— passage underlined by
Diane Arbus in her copy of
The Works of Plato

Photography used to be the poor relative of painting. But the images that have been burned into collective memory over the last half-century or so, are mostly photographic ones.

None have made a greater impact than the images of Diane Arbus (1923-71), the brilliant, well-educated daughter of a Jewish New York department store owner. She at first seemed slated for a career as a fashion illustrator. But eventually, in less than a decade, she produced a singularly American record of the poor and the lame and the weird: giants and dwarfs, transvestites and sideshow freaks, aging nudists and aging strippers, flabby hookers and aging socialites and suburban aunties (the latter among the very few who are recorded smiling).

Her photographs are the most singular in the canon, her images all obtained with the full cooperation of the subjects, their often riveting frontal gaze turned directly on us through her lens. The quality of the prints and their use of establishing environment endows them with a timeless presence. In more ways than one, Arbus was the Velazquez of photography.

Arbus took her own life aged 48, after an overdose of barbiturates and slashing her wrists, leaving behind two daughters, Doon and Amy; Doon, the eldest daughter and the administrator of her mother’s estate, is the co-author of this remarkable book’s full and frank chronology that accompanies the technically illuminating texts by San Francisco Museum curator Sandra S. Phillips and Parsons photography professor Neil Selkirk. (Incidentally, Doon Arbus is a playwright, novelist and critic; her sister Amy is a successful professional photographer).

Doon Arbus writes that the current volume (prepared for this year’s huge retrospective exhibition of 351 prints at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) is the result of research she likens to an ongoing archeological excavation. Her biographical chronology (written with co-curator Elizabeth Sussman) is interspersed with fascinating letters written by her mother and extracts from the jottings in Diane’s numerous notebooks. These evidence a keen, informed intelligence and a serious thinker about her medium. Altogether, there is more about Diane Arbus here than in any previous publication.

Diane was born Diane Nemerov, second child of a sometime army lieutenant who was merchandising director of his father-in-law’s fur Manhattan emporia, an enterprise soon to become Russek’s department store on Fifth Avenue. Here little Diane was treated like a genuine Jewish princess and hated it.

The Nemerovs took their children along when making frequent fashion buying trips to Europe. David Nemerov admired the Impressionists (in retirement he took up painting) and encouraged his children’s interest in art. As a teenager, Diane took painting lessons but with little enthusiasm. After years of dating Allan Arbus (b. 1918), who was soon to become an accomplished young couture photographer, she married him in 1941. Officiating was the Rev. Dr. Israel Goldstein, later to become famous as the founder of the Goldstein Youth Village in Jerusalem.

Diane’s early connections to photography were all highly sophisticated. Allan gave her a Graflex camera and she took lessons from the great Bernice Abbot, no less, passing on the obtained technical information to her husband. Already a habitue of Moma, she and Allan then met Alfred Steiglitz at his studio/gallery, where she took a special interest in the work of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt and pioneer Eugene Atget.

Later she studied with her good friends Richard Avedon and the late Marvin Israel. (Avedon is still doing brilliant portraits for The New Yorker, as its first staff photographer). Her correspondence with Marvin Israel is illuminating. One of the many postcards she sent him (in 1960) read:"I don’t press the shutter. The image does…"

When the US entered the war Allan enlisted and was assigned to the Signal Corps as a photographer. In 1944 he was sent India and Burma; Diana, then pregnant, began recording her pregnancy in a series of deadpan, near-naked self-portraits, one of which is reproduced in this book.

After the war Diane, Allan and daughter Doon travelled in France, Spain and Italy and after an educational year rather reluctantly returned to New York. Their professional partnership did not last. Eventually, neither did their marriage; they separated in 1958.

But for years Allan continued to help Diane with support of her burgeoning career as an offbeat photographer for the nation’s leading magazines. They finally divorced in 1969 after Allan went west to study acting (he later met and then married a student actress; fans of the TV series M*A*S*H may remember him as the army psychiatrist Major Sidney Freedman, a role he played between 1972-83). He was married in 1971, not long before Diane’s suicide.

THROUGHOUT THE 1960s Diane met often with a large number of photographers and pop musicians and an even larger number of Bohemian and society figures. She also contacted famous sex researchers and photographed orgies, taking part in at least one of them, in which she appears naked in a self-conscious post-coital pose. She herself condemned the results as contrived. Ever beady-eyed, she wrote about the less than salubrious and unattractive nudist camps and their teenage waitresses as living in a form of hallucination. Behind it all was an insatiable curiosity about life and people, rather than what might well be thought anthropological research.

Arbus planned all her theme projects in advance, making copious notes. A typical one was a mid-West baton-twirling competition. She also had an abiding interest in triplets and twins; her 1967 double portrait of the neatly ordinary twin girls from Roselle, a truly remarkable composition, is deathless and one of the prints that brought her fame. A champion of Arbus since 1962 was John Szarkowski, who that year became director of the department of photography at Moma. He and Moma director Rene d’Harnoncourt gave her a number of shows and in 1970 Szarkowski hired her to research an exhibition of themes from the "picture press." These included groups defined variously as Heroes, Losers, Ceremonies, Disasters, Conundrums etc. These groupings were typical of Diane’s own projects.

Diane was an early admirer of the late ambulance-chasing tabloid press photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig, recently exhibited at the Israel Museum). Unlike him, she aimed for depth, both of the print and of the model’s character. But she was not above manipulation. In this volume there are a number of reproductions of her contact sheets, like those of the Roselle twins and the famously horrifying shot of a boy in Central Park holding a (toy) hand grenade. In the enlargement, the very thin, grimacing boy looks spastic and quite deranged; in the rest of the contact prints he looks like a smiling, healthy, likable kid. Not only can the camera lie; so can its operator.

As if all the extraordinary images and excellent texts in this book were not enough, there are 52 extremely useful and efficiently written potted biographies of every major figure mentioned in this catalog. A treat.