Arbus: Another Angle

Film stars, socialites, and international celebrities— the photographer DIANE ARBUS confronted them with the same unblinking gaze she turned toward the octogenarian in the satin Uncle Sam suit and the lady bishop who said she’d been Jesus Christ’s twin sister. These exclusive pictures, together with writing by and about Arbus, are from the forthcoming book Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

When Diane Arbus began bringing her work to magazine editors in VV the late 1950s, she was following in the footsteps of a number of other photographers, including Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, and William Klein, as well as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who had found in magazines a means of earning a living and getting their work published. Books of photography were rare in those days, galleries dealing in photographic prints were virtually nonexistent, grants were hard to come by, and museums were still adhering to fairly rigid definitions of what constituted photographic art. Arbus appears to have drawn no easy distinction between her approach to an assignment and her approach to a project of her own. As a result, the technical and stylistic changes evident in the photographs she took for magazines over the course of eleven years reflect the development of her work as a whole. They also demonstrate that her direct, apparently simple, straightforward style was actually the result of a persistent effort to discover the techniques best suited to her photographic intentions, and to find the most appropriate, most telling approach to the variety of subjects that confronted her.

Thomas W. Southall

Diane Arbus writing to Robert Benton, art director of Esquire magazine, in 1959

I have been peering into Rolls-Royces and skulking around the Plaza and Thursday evening I am to meet a half man, half woman to see if she (it is referred to as she) will take me to her house.... I was looking for some club that would be good for the upper in the sense of respectable like the D.A.R. or the W.C.T.U. or a society for the suppression of something or other like vice or sin. Maybe his secretary could find one such. Brady once photographed the D.A.R. and it was, in the French sense, formidable.. . .Meanwhile, please get me permissions, both posh and sordid. The more the merrier.

We can’t tell in advance where the most will be. I can only get photographs by photographing. I will go anywhere. The Edwardian Room and the Salvation Army.

To Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, and Benton in 1960

About eccentrics.. .

Edith Sitwell says in what is the prettiest definition: ANY DUMB BUT PREGNANT COMMENT ON LIFE, ANY CRITICISM OF THE WORLD'S ARRANGEMENT, IF EXPRESSED BY ONLY ONE GESTURE, AND THAT OF SUFFICIENT CONTORTION,

BECOMES ECCENTRICITY. Or, if that word has too double an edge, we could use some others: the anomalies, the quixotic, the dedicated, who believe in the impossible, who make their mark on themselves, who-if-you-were-going-to-meet-them-for-the-first-time-would-haveno-need-of-a-carnation-in-their-buttonhole.

Like the very irate lady who appears at night pulling a red kiddies express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with alley cats in fancy hats and dresses. And a man in Brooklyn called The Mystic Barber who teleports himself to Mars and says he is dead and wears a copper band round his forehead with antennae on it to receive his instructions from the Martians. There is also a very cheerful man with only half a beard and someone who collects woodpecker holes as well as a lady in the Bronx who has trained herself to eat and sleep under water. I have heard of someone who lived for a year in a wooden box which measured 3 feet by 8 feet and a man who built himself a robot 7 feet tall which obeys orders and inhales when smoking. Or a man who walks down Broadway carrying a divining rod proclaiming the potency of the Holy Water in the Bronx. There used to be a negro man dressed all in black who carried a hangman’s noose and a single rose, and I know a lady who searches ceaselessly for something she has lost and never finds. And oh, the glorious, furious veiled lady in the fuchsia silk gown trailing to her ankles, carrying a lace parasol which has the word BOO scrawled many times across it. Of course there is a lady in Mt. Kisco with a lion in her living room and a man who has invented a noiseless soup spoon and a little woman with 500,000 wishbones. And an 80-year-old man about 4 feet high who pretends to be Uncle Sam because he thinks people would like to think he is. (He has invited me to accompany him to the Presidential inauguration so I can watch him be the first man to shake the hand of Dwight D. Eisenhower when he is no longer President.) As well as the lovely people who built their houses of broken crockery, like the one in California or the one in Chartres. Surely there must be another somewhere nearer. There is a man reputed to be the heir to some

fortune or other who sews himself a weekly costume of varicolored scraps of fabric with, for example, one pants leg of red and the other, orange. A hermit would be splendid. I remember one who turned up in the newspaper having his census taken. There used to be a man on Eighth Avenue limping along with a flute and a bandaged head, a living replica of The Spirit of ’76. And there is a man who has 82 skeletons and 26 mummies in his basement, as well as someone who can write the Gettysburg Address on a human hair, although that might be rather hard to see. All we need are a few of the most lyrical, magical, metaphorical, like the man in New Jersey who has been collecting string for 20 years, winding it in a ball which is by now 5 feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room. And I have heard of a one-eyed lady miser who can be found in the Automat.

These are the Characters In A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups.

Wouldn’t it be lovely?

Yes.

To Peter Crookston, deputy editor of the Sunday Times Magazine of London, in 1968

I have been wanting to do families... .Especially there is a woman I stopped in a Bookstore who lives in Westchester which is Upper Suburbia. She is about 35 with terribly blonde hair and enormously eyelashed and booted and probably married to a dress manufacturer or restaurateur and I said I want to photograph her with her husband and children so she suggested I wait till warm weather so I can do it around the pool! They are a fascinating family. I think all families are creepy in a way.

To Crookston in 1969

Let me do something about very rich people—beyond my wildest dreams—when I come over. Maybe at least some of the Wives of Famous Men should be Enormously Splendid. And I was wondering about those mysterious clinics where ladies are fed monkey glands and cow foetuses or are put to sleep for six months for the rejuvenation of it, somewhere in Switzerland. Dr. Niehans is the only name I remember. It sounds so Boris Karloff. Clearly it would be hard to photograph freely, but if that proves impossible it seems like it would be interesting verbally.

To Crookston in 1969

Think of this: That Beauty is itself an aberration, a burden, a mystery, even to itself. What if I were to photograph Great Beauties. (I don’t know quite how they’d look but I think, like Babies, they can take the most remorseless scrutiny.) And they would talk to Pauline [Peters] about How It Feels. Often they Hate their noses or find their chins too long. Sometimes they feel painfully valuable like objects, and they are Taken Up and Made Much of. I once knew a beautiful girl for whom every suitor was like an impresario; they didn’t just want to make love, they wanted to make her over. One man, Svengali-fashion, got her to eat nothing but applesauce for months. .. another made her stand on her head. Each one was a new discipline. She is now not so beautiful and I think she is a little relieved.

Excerpted from Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, text and photographs by Diane Arbus, essay by Thomas W. Southall; to be published by Aperture in October.