Authors: Patricia Bosworth
Suzanne Mantell, another student, remembers how “Arbus asked us to bring in examples of our favorite things and explain
why
they were our favorites. Someone brought in Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa.
I brought in a spatula—you know, the kind that flips over pancakes? And Diane brought in her collection of favorite cut-outs and rip-outs, images torn from every conceivable magazine and newspaper.” “It was very significant,” Neil Selkirk says. “It seemed to be saying you don’t have to be an artist to produce something that moves people.”
Another assignment was to describe an experience you couldn’t photograph. “Diane wanted us to tell her our stories,” Anne Tucker says. “She would get angry if we weren’t specific. She kept insisting, ‘Tell
exactly
what happened. Where were you when that happened?’ ”
Ikko Narahara, a young Japanese photographer who taped all of the Arbus classes, described the time he’d been in Holland trying to photograph a crane in flight. When he found a crane perched in a nest on a rooftop, he set up his cameras very carefully and then waited all day for the propitious moment. Finally the crane flapped her wings—and shit on the roof. Diane loved that story.
Anne Tucker described her father’s funeral. “I was walking up the aisle of the church behind my father’s coffin. And suddenly someone in a pew whispered, ‘She doesn’t have any gloves on,’ and I looked down at my hands. It was a totally visual moment. Diane repeated that anecdote several times.”
Another assignment was to photograph something or somebody you’ve never photographed before—or are in awe of, or afraid of. Eva Rubinstein asked Diane if she could photograph her. “Diane was a little taken aback, but she agreed. She insisted, however, that I do it at the ungodly hour of eight a.m. I said okay, although it would be hard for me; I tend to be a late riser. It was pouring rain that morning—the morning I arrived at Westbeth. Diane was ready for me, dressed in those funny, low-slung, black leather pants and black top she often wore. She seemed harried, but then she always seemed harried to me. She said she had an appointment at the dentist, so be quick about it. Her daughter Amy was there, too. She had just washed her hair and she was sitting on the bed with her head wrapped in a bright red towel. She watched us without speaking. Nearby, on the wall, there were strange pictures tacked up—of penises sticking out of belly buttons—kinky, strange stuff. I began setting up my tripod (I used a Rollei 66), and as I did, I noticed Diane sidle over to the mirror and begin to primp—fix her hair. I thought, ‘What a reversal! Diane Arbus
trying to make herself look as good as possible before she’s photographed.’ And, of course, she knew how to pose after all those years of shooting fashion models—she struck exactly the right angle, and she was poised and cool. The session didn’t take very long. Coincidentally, that afternoon I photographed Robert Frank—I’d been waiting months to do that. The following week I brought Diane’s portrait in to class, but I could tell she didn’t like it that much.” (Rubinstein excels in austere, elegant still-lifes containing sumptuous light.) “The only other comment she made about my work was about another portrait—one of my best, a portrait of the dying Violet Trefusis [Vita Sackville-West’s lover] which I’d taken in her bedroom in Florence. Diane remarked, ‘The subject is better than the photograph!’ I took that to mean that if she’d taken the picture, it would have been a better picture. Diane’s childlikeness surprised me. She could giggle like a teen-ager one minute, then turn somber and exhausted the next. Once she commented to several of us in class, out of the blue, ‘I was born way up the ladder of middle-class respectability and I’ve been clambering down as fast as I could ever since.’ ”
During class Diane would sit cross-legged on the floor, passing nuts and dried fruits for everybody to munch on. She kept saying, “You’ve got to learn not to be careful.” She talked about how taking a portrait is like seducing someone. She talked about how she used everything she had to obtain a photograph—from “acting dumb” to dropping things, distracting her subjects so they’d feel less threatened. “Most people like having their picture taken,” she said. “They like being paid attention to.”
Somebody asked her, “Do you think your pictures are cruel?” And she answered, “No, these people wanted to have their pictures taken—agreed to have their pictures taken.” She added that she would never take a picture of somebody who didn’t want it, and she said that she had passed up possible photographs because she couldn’t ask the subject to pose without hurting or embarrassing him. There was a man she saw one night, riding on the subway. She said his entire face was covered with warts and she wanted to take his picture, but she couldn’t without making him feel even more self-conscious than he already was.
She always answered the students’ questions very directly, although she hated being pinned down. (When Diana Edkins, Condé Nast photo-researcher, tried to interview her, Diane said, “Okay—let’s do it right now, but I warn you, I may disagree with what I say now tomorrow.”) But she loved to talk, and to these classes she talked and talked and talked. And Suzanne Mantell, Anne Tucker, Mary Ellen Andrews, and others took notes on some of the things she said.
She talked about photographing Bennett Cerf and “mucking it up.” She had come back to his office a second time, even though she didn’t think it would work a second time if it hadn’t worked the first. “And Cerf presented his face to me from behind his newspaper and…it was like his ass because it was so round and blank.” Famous people reminded Diane of “postage stamps. You know their faces but you don’t know them…if you see a movie star on the street, you want to go up and pinch their cheek.”
She said she once went to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s house in Westport and they looked “like they had lightbulbs inside them. Radiant with health—movie stars got this health thing faster than (the rest of us).”
She spoke of photography as “an adventure.” And then in an aside she commented, “Someone once defined horror for me as the relationship between sex and death.
“Choosing a project can be ironic,” she went on. “Everybody’s got irony. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the structure, the detail, the significance… What I mean is, I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
“[As a photographer] there are two feelings in you. One is you really want to get closer [to the image]. The other thing is that you’ve got some edge…you’re carrying some slight magic which fixes [the subject] in some way.”
She urged the class to “photograph something real…that’s fantasy. Where fantasy comes from is the reality. The fantasy is [total], it really is. It is totally fantastic that we look [the way we do], and sometimes you see that very clearly in a picture. Because it’s so real, it’s fantastic—not that it’s so fantastic that it’s real. Reality is reality, and if you scrutinize reality close enough, you really, really get to it. It’s fantastic. You have to use the term reality to represent what really is in front of the camera. What I’m saying is, let’s call reality reality and let’s call dreams dreams.”
In class she kept stressing the factual, the literal, the specificity inherent in photography. She loved Bill Dane’s postcard photographs of American landscapes. She encouraged Bruce Weber (who became celebrated in the 1980s with his beautiful, stately photographs of Calvin Klein underwear for men). At the same time Diane could not respond to Ralph Gibson’s multiple images and she told him so when he asked her to recommend him for a Guggenheim.
She showed the class a few of her pictures—like the angry little boy
holding the hand grenade—but, according to one student, “Diane never actually explained
how
she got those images or how she convinced so many weird people to pose for her.”
She referred to her most recent experiences photographing at a home for retardates, and she described attending a dance at the home and watching an incredibly heart-stopping handicapped couple dance—he was tall and skinny and his girl was tiny and radiant with “red hair like Maureen O’Hara.” Diane herself had danced with a sixty-year-old handicapped man who was very shy and spoke like a six-year-old boy.
She took many photographs at the retardates’ home, but she insisted, “I’ve never taken a picture I intended. They’re always better or worse.”
She went on to say, “A photograph has to be specific. I remember Lisette Model telling me, ‘The more specific you are, the more general you’ll be.’ ”
She ended one class with the thought: “When you get confused, look [away] from your pictures. Look out the window. Because somehow the reality is the act of making a picture yourself.
“I can tell you a picture. We’re all verbal and visual; it’s all open to us.”
Between classes Diane spent a great deal of time at the Walker Evans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She’d been so anxious to see it that she, Avedon, Marvin Israel, and Jim Dine had sneaked in while the show was being hung in early January of 1971, and they had wandered around “in great spirits,” stopping to savor particular photographs that inspired them. As usual, Diane was also juggling a variety of assignments: photographing Cliff Gorman as Lenny Bruce for
Vogue,
photographing Hortense Calisher for her new book (but Calisher hated the portrait and asked that it be destroyed). She also flew to Detroit to photograph the controversial black separatist minister Albert Cleage for
Essence
magazine, and she caught him with just a touch of a smirk on his mouth. Cleage liked the portrait so much that it now hangs in the meeting hall of his new church in Houston. The rest of Diane’s days were taken up completing a series for Time-Life Books. “It’s about love,” she said.
She photographed a bridal fashion show and girls trying on their gowns for their mothers and fiancés; she photographed a homosexual couple, but the culmination of the project came when she heard about a New Jersey housewife who was particularly devoted to her pet monkey, Sam. Sam was a baby macaque, and the housewife kept him dressed in bonnet and snowsui? so that he resembled a tiny, ancient-faced baby. Diane used
an electronic flash placed close to the camera to create harsh shadows, but there is a halo effect above the housewife’s head. She called the resulting portrait “Madonna and Child.”
By simulating amateur-snapshot techniques, she hoped to catch the “total ordinariness” of the backgrounds. Many of her pictures dissatisfied her because “the woman was cooing or eager or nervous,” but the monkey picture she thought was right. It had the effect of looking like a father’s snapshot of his wife and child, emphasized by the housewife, who, according to Diane, “was extremely serious and grave holding her monkey, the same way you’d be grave about the safety of a child.”
Whenever she could find the time, Diane would go to her new darkroom located in a basement on Charles Street. It was totally quiet there and very well organized—all her pictures filed from one to a thousand, and she would print from six a.m. till noon if she could. She was making up a series of prints for a portfolio—a limited edition of fifty portfolios in which twelve of her best portraits (among them the nudist family and the twins) would be signed and annotated by her and displayed “in a nearly invisible glass box designed by Marvin Israel.” She hoped to sell the portfolio’s to museums and private collectors for $1000 apiece.
*
She was also developing and printing more retardate pictures from Vineland. She kept going back to the home and staying there as long as she could before returning with fresh rolls of film. The images excited and disturbed her every time they came swimming into the enlarger. By now she had enough pictures for a book, but she felt ambivalent about a book, just as she felt ambivalent about another show, although she didn’t say that to T. Hartwell when he visited her at Westbeth; he sat on the floor of her apartment for an entire afternoon while she showed him a batch of the retardate pictures—like the old woman in the wheelchair wearing a plastic mask and holding a Halloween candy bag in her lap. “Diane was obviously very moved by these pictures. ‘These people are so angelic,’ she kept telling me.” Hartwell says he was moved by the pictures, too, because even in her most anguished probing there was complete artistic control. “As always, Diane took you ‘inside’ and you got a distinct sense of what these characters were about.” Once again Hartwell urged her to consider a one-woman show in Minneapolis—she was ready for it, he said. And she seemed almost to agree, although they set no date.
She could not tell him her true feelings: that if there was a book of her
work, or another exhibit, her life would be “over.” That would be it. Somehow, for her work to live—to flourish, to grow—it could not be contained between pages or hung on walls where it would be judged, scrutinized, interpreted by strangers. She preferred to give her work to friends—to Nancy Grossman, Harold Hayes, Robert Benton, Tina Fredericks, Peter Crookston, Bea Feitler, Richard Avedon.
Her friends accepted the powerful instability in her pictures—the disorienting light, the atmosphere of psychological crisis. One of her last portraits is also one of her greatest: an “albino sword-swallower” stands in front of a flapping carnival tent performing her act. Her arms are stretched out like Christ on the cross, but her head is thrown back so triumphantly you can almost feel the sharpness of the blade sliding down her throat. The image is grotesque and defiantly spiritual.
In her last class Diane spoke of the French photographer Brassaï and his shadowy images of whores and late-night cafés in Paris. “Brassaï taught me something about obscurity, because for years I’ve been hipped on clarity,” she said. “Lately it’s been striking me how I really love what I can’t see in a photograph. In Brassaï, in Bill Brandt, there is the element of actual physical darkness and it’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”
After her final lecture Diane invited her students to her duplex for a party. Lisette Model was there, too, and Diane seemed particularly proud to have her teacher present. Everyone wandered around, intrigued by the apartment. The rooms were light, airy, sparsely furnished. Green, leafy plants flowered in one corner and voluminous cheesecloth curtains billowed out from the windows; a strong breeze blowing in from the Hudson River made the material flap and flutter. Someone noticed sharp prickles or mirrored chips embedded in the furs and animal skins draped across a huge bed set up on a platform. Someone else noticed black satin sheets covering the mattress; Avedon’s portrait of Eisenhower stood on a table, and propped against a wall was a blow-up of what appeared to be people with their guts hanging out. Ruth Ansel assumed it might be something from the
Daily News
files. “What is it?” she demanded. Diane’s only answer was, “I like it. It’s terrific. Don’t you think it’s terrific?”