Among the ominous hallucinations that terrify the little boy who tricycles manically through the deserted hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a pair of female twins whose appearance, posture, and affect are a quotation from, or an homage to, Diane Arbus’s photograph “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967.” The little girls in the film are harbingers of the hotel’s gory past and the boy’s violent future, and the vision of Kubrick’s eerie sisters, superimposed upon our own memory of Arbus’s portrait, not only telegraphs its sinister import with the eloquent concision of a Chinese character but provides an extra somatic jolt, a shiver of apprehension.
If, however, you actually study the picture—included, in several variant versions, in Diane Arbus: Revelations, a new collection of her photographs and biographical material—the girls hardly seem like candidates for cameo roles in a horror film, no matter how nuanced and brilliant. The news they bring is not about death but birth; they’re poster children for DNA, witnesses to heredity’s power to send us into the world fully formed—doubled, if that’s our luck. It would seem naive to deny the fact that there’s an inherent strangeness about twins. But like all serious art, Arbus’s work resists generalization to focus on the specific, or, more accurately, arrives at a general truth by examining a highly particular reality.
And so, if you look closely, what seems strangest about these specific twins (aside, perhaps, from their Siberian-husky pale eyes) is that they’re dressed and coiffed so identically, like the two halves of a Rorschach blot; even their bobby pins are in the same places. Arbus began her career as a fashion photographer and, everywhere in her portraiture, she intends details of dress, hairstyle, makeup, and gesture (the way someone holds a cigarette, for example) to communicate as articulately as they do in life. At one point, she remarked that fashion photography didn’t interest her because the people in the pictures weren’t wearing their own clothes. What engaged her far more was how people select their outfits, their chosen methods of self-presentation—and the ways in which their personalities affect (and seem to rub off on) what they wear.
Unlike the Kubrick image, which flashes by at a speed that manages to evoke the instincts of those cultures that credit twins with necromantic powers, the Arbus photograph gives us time to study the twins’ faces, which are actually quite lovely and not menacing or freakish in the least. The significant differences in their facial expressions would be (if only we could interpret them) keys to the deepest mysteries of individual personality; and whatever secrets they harbor seem less like sources of horror than causes for their own bemusement.
“Identical Twins” has, like numerous Arbus photos, become an icon—which may not be the most fortunate fate to befall a work of art. Because when we call something “iconic,” part of what we mean is that we assume we can see it without looking. And once we can summon an image from memory, reconstruct it in our minds, interpret it in ways that become convenient substitutions for the image itself, we may lose our motivation to revisit the actual object as often—and to study it as closely—as we should. We stop returning to it for the periodic soundings that it can provide on the subject of how we, and the world around us, have changed with age and maturity, and in the course of time. (One could argue that the worst thing that can happen to a work of art is to wind up on a cocktail napkin, as have Monet’s water lilies and Georgia O’Keeffe’s poppies; happily for Arbus fans, it’s hard to imagine her portraits of the transvestite in curlers or three geriatric Russian midgets becoming the sorts of icons that decorate drink coasters.)
One of the most welcome and corrective aspects of Revelations is that it brushes off the obscuring patina of iconography and invites us to see Arbus’s art in fresh ways, amending and deepening our own partial memories and surface impressions. Revelations features, along with more familiar works, scores of less famous and previously unknown photographs, contact sheets, and variant prints of single images. The book includes essays by Sandra S. Phillips and by photographer Neil Selkirk, the exclusive printer for Arbus’s estate since her death. Jeff Rosenheim, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has contributed capsule biographies of the friends, family members, and colleagues who surrounded and influenced Arbus. Finally, there is the engrossing and, as it were, revelatory Diane Arbus: A Chronology. Compiled by Elisabeth Sussman and by the artist’s daughter Doon, it lists the major events in Arbus’s life, contains quotes from her letters and notebooks, and includes biographical documents and artifacts ranging from family photos to grant applications, from her high school report card to her autopsy report.
The fascinating assemblage of history, jottings, and detritus that makes up Chronology hangs solidly on a structure built from the facts of Arbus’s life, and from the many photographs in which she herself always looks beautiful and wholly different each time, until her last years, when exhaustion evidently slowed the mercurial shifts in appearance. The biographical material contradicts the myths that have come to surround her, the aura that has had a great deal—too much—to do with her suicide, in 1971. For it seems to be the particular fate of female artist suicides—Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath naturally come to mind—that self-murder lends a sort of romantic and even ghoulish luster to their reputations and causes their art to be seen, selectively and often inaccurately, through the narrow prism of the manner in which they died.
Born in 1923 to the wealthy owners of a Manhattan department store, Diane Nemerov led a cosseted childhood, attended private school, and, at eighteen, married Allan Arbus, whom she’d met when she was fifteen. An extremely close couple with a palpable sexual charge, the Arbuses collaborated on fashion photographs for such venues as Vogue and Glamour.
Increasingly frustrated by the restrictions of her day job, Arbus—who by then had two daughters—separated from her husband and quit the studio in order to pursue her own work. Her inclusion, along with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, in the 1967 New Documents show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art boosted her reputation, and from then on she enjoyed a combination (more common then than it is now) of artistic celebrity, popular notoriety, and penury. She received a Guggenheim grant, published in magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, and the London Sunday Times Magazine, won an award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and sold work to numerous museums. Nonetheless, she was always scrambling for money, and she spent her final years living in Westbeth, a fortress-like subsidized-housing complex for artists in the far West Village, where tenancy required that residents earn no more than $8,400 a year.
The admirable, hardworking, resilient, and gifted woman who emerges from these pages bears only intermittent resemblance to the spectral depressive seeking risky thrills on the dark side and having casual sex with strangers—that is, the Diane Arbus one encounters in the popular imagination and in such books as Patricia Bosworth’s respectful 1995 biography. It’s true that, in Arbus’s occasional writings, the word gloomy and profound doubts about her self-worth recur with increasing and chilling frequency over the years, as do accounts of physical illness, rejection, and alternating periods of elation and depression.
“Energy, some special kind of energy, just leaks out,” she records, “and I am left lacking the confidence even to cross the street.”
Despite daunting health and financial problems, she worked continuously. The list of professional assignments that sent her to cover events—ranging from Tricia Nixon’s wedding to an antiwar demonstration—is dizzying, and the urgency and gratitude with which she sought and received commissions makes more sense when you realize that, at the time, top dollar for a magazine shoot was a few hundred dollars. She interacted productively with several generations of photographic colleagues, from MoMA curator John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, and Helen Levitt (who wrote Arbus’s first Guggenheim recommendation) to Bruce Davidson and Joel Meyerowitz, and she recorded her responses to influences such as Lartigue, Brassaï, August Sander, and her teacher and mentor, Lisette Model.
Driven by the exacting demands of her unique vocation, she nonetheless seems to have had limitless love and energy for her children and a genuine, passionate interest in their individual personalities. Her postcards and notes to them are chatty and sparkling; in one letter to her daughter Amy, Diane bravely, if not entirely convincingly, portrays a grim hospital stay (for hepatitis) as a glorious adventure. Yet, lest we mistake Diane Arbus for a respectable single mother, supporting herself as an artist, with a taste for eccentric folk, there is one especially jaw-dropping image amid a series of contact strips. The repeated subject is a couple, two lovers: a handsome, bare-chested black man in a pair of white pants, and a white woman, naked or wearing a transparent nightgown. The caption states simply, without elaboration, “In the frame second from the top of the center strip Diane is lying across the man’s lap in place of the woman.” There is no point noting the obvious: that the photographer is naked. This, and the inclusion of several photos of the same models, among them a blonde transvestite with terrific cleavage and a “young Brooklyn family,” taken in different settings and apparently on different occasions, acknowledges that Arbus’s relationships with her subjects were often more intimate, intense, and prolonged than those of other photographers—for example, Weegee.
All of this enhances whatever conclusions we might draw from Arbus’s own comments, made during one of the interviews that form the text of her 1972 Aperture monograph, about the fact that she was naked when photographing nudist colonies: “You think you’re going to feel a little silly walking around with nothing on but your camera. But that part is really sort of fun.”
In its austere shorthand of document, date, and quotation, Chronology portrays one of those artists who seem to have ordained what they would eventually accomplish. A high school paper on Chaucer reads like a prescient analysis of the preoccupations that would animate Arbus’s work:
His way of looking at everything is like that of a newborn baby; he sees things and each one seems wonderful . . . simply because it is unique and it is there. When he describes the nun’s daintiness, it doesn’t seem as if he thinks that that is a standard of good conduct . . . rather he turns separately to each one and looks at them as a whole miracle not as compounds of abstract qualities.
She was, from early on, an avid reader, and the book is filled with references to writers ranging from Plato to Rilke to Italo Svevo. She herself wrote beautifully, had a great gift for narrative and description, and for reflecting on her process in ways that are often witty, incisive, and as tantalizingly elusive as the work itself. “I think I must have been brought up to be a sort of magic mirror who reflects what anyone wants to believe because I can’t believe they believe it, like Atlas holding up a bubble and groaning.” She thought in grand, ambitious terms, planned future projects, mapped avenues of investigation, and made simultaneously encyclopedic and idiosyncratic lists of subjects to explore: “a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”
Even as Chronology expands our view of the artist herself, the hundreds of familiar and unknown images collected here, and the elegance and exactitude with which they are printed, refute and dismantle the half-truths about, and knee-jerk responses to, her work. In its crudest possible form, one notion of Arbus’s oeuvre describes a limited palette: high-contrast, confrontational portraits of tormented freaks—a categorization that could be applied, just as unhelpfully, to the majority of Gogol and Dostoyevsky characters. Included is a quote from a memoir by Diane’s brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, in which he expresses something uncomfortably close to this received opinion of the work of his sister: “a professional photographer, whose pictures are spectacular, shocking, dramatic, and concentrate on subjects perverse and queer (freaks, professional transvestites, strong men, tattooed men, the children of the very rich).”
As Revelations argues, little could be more reductive, or more unfair. In fact, her range was wide, and included not just portraits but landscapes, such as the surrealistic “Clouds on Screen at a Drive-in, N.J., 1960,” and the simultaneously ironic and romantic “A Castle in Disneyland, Cal., 1962.” Her subjects were not only sideshow performers but dancing couples and newborns, not just anonymous women with unfortunate relationships to cosmetics but celebrity heartthrobs such as Marcello Mastroianni, not just retarded inmates but geniuses such as Jorge Luis Borges, not just sword swallowers but pretty kids.
Reminiscent of certain of Helen Levitt’s pictures, “Two Boys Smoking in Central Park, 1962” radiates admiration for the insouciant style and beauty of the boys. If the light and the lens—and an eye for composition—are a photographer’s principal tools, Revelations proves that Arbus could, at will, make her technique invisible or, conversely, achieve theatrically virtuosic effects. Two photographs of a movie screen showing the film Baby Doll and another shot of a darkened theater in which a movie is being shown are dazzling visual dissections of how cinema deploys darkness and light. You don’t have to understand the full implications of what it means to print on pre-cadmium purged Agfa Portriga-Rapid paper developed in a solution of Dektol and Selectol Soft to grasp how Neil Selkirk’s essay informs what we can plainly see in the photos—namely, that Arbus knew what she was doing and what she wanted, not only on the street but also in the darkroom. She knew how to let the light locate and pick out telling, glittering details: the wedding-cake-like trophy that a muscle builder displays in his Brooklyn dressing room, or the Asian knickknacks, shiny dress, jewelry, coffee cup, and pill bottle of a widow in her Manhattan apartment.
The contact sheets in Revelations function as a primer on Arbus’s working methods and on photography in general. The remarkably contradictory information conveyed by each separate frame dispels any notion that photography is about uncovering and telling “the truth.” Or perhaps it argues that there is no such thing as a single truth about a complex human being. In only one shot does the sweet, eager-to-please, fussily dressed little boy reveal the twisted maniac Arbus depicted in “Child with a Toy Grenade in Central Park, 1962.” And the different and fleeting moods caught in multiple images of a single sitting reveal the intelligence and the compositional sense that inspired Arbus to choose the version of “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970” that shows the two (comparatively) normal-size parents grouped on one side of their son, staring up, in apparent wonder, at their prodigious offspring. Other shots, in which the giant stands between his parents with his arms draped around their shoulders, are merely a joke about size—and not, like the final version, a metaphor for the astonishment parents feel toward the fully grown beings they can barely believe they created.
In an afterword to Revelations, Doon Arbus writes that a photograph should be allowed to speak for itself, without explanatory, contextual, or biographical data. And indeed, we hardly need a word of text in order to respond, cerebrally and viscerally, to the intricate mysteriousness of what Diane Arbus is showing us. We can, without help, track the visual and thematic obsessions that last throughout her career, her fascination with the tension between how people wish to look and how they actually appear (what she called “the gap between intention and effect”), as well as with ambiguities of all types: with people whose appearance confounds whatever we had assumed to be the signal divisions between male and female, young and old, beautiful and ugly. Without reading the Guggenheim application in which she outlines a project involving rituals and ceremonies, we intuit that she was drawn to the rites that establish a community’s hierarchies and tighten the bonds of a common identity. Without learning that she worked on journalistic projects on the themes of love and the family, we gather that these subjects were of consummate interest to her, objects of a curiosity that grows in proportion to the distance between her family constellations and our traditional assumptions about how these groups should look. And even without noting how references to mirrors recur in her notebooks, we can tell how profoundly she identified with her subjects, how she was always looking for something of herself in them, and how that identification and that search prevent her pictures from seeming exploitative, clinical, superior, or judgmental.
But even if we ourselves believe in the primacy of the work itself, in the centrality of the object that nimbly eludes any attempt at summary or interpretation, still we can’t much suppress our appetite for those works and documents—Woolf’s diaries, Chekhov’s letters—in which an artist steps out from behind the scrim to comment directly on matters of art, the self, and the world. And so it is with the text of Revelations, in which Arbus’s own words function as guides of a sort, tactful and unobtrusive, but nonetheless encouraging us to notice things that we otherwise might have overlooked.
One such helpful prompting arises from the fact that many of the extracts from Arbus’s writings—indeed, most of the ones set in a larger typeface and given pages of their own—employ the vocabulary of religion and of spiritual autobiography. Scattered throughout are references to conversion, God and the devil, Adam and Eve, divinity, blasphemy, and faith. The book’s title and its epigraph are taken from an Arbus quote: “And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains—a further chapter in the history of the mystery . . .” She writes about Mae West, whom she photographed, hearing the voice of God and longing to lift the hemline of the unknown, and describes a roomful of baton twirlers as practicing “a most ascetic mystic moral discipline.”
Once you allow your thoughts to be nudged ever so gently in that direction, it becomes easy to spot, along the way, images that evoke the classic tropes of Western and Eastern religious art: the kitschy “Buddhist” altar decorating the Manhattan widow’s living room; a nudist Adam and Eve, holding hands in a forest glade; the windblown crucifixion of the “Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival, Md., 1970”; the benediction offered in “Bishop by the Sea, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964,” by a white-haired old woman who apparently called herself the Bishop, and who is shown wearing a silvery robe and a goofy homemade miter, extending her arms and holding, in one hand, a cross patterned with smaller crosses. In one of the volume’s most moving images, a dominatrix embraces a customer, extracting a moment of tenderness from a presumably ritualized cash transaction and enacting a tableau reminiscent of any number of paintings in which saints (this one improbably clad in a bustier and patterned panty hose) are clothing the naked or comforting the sick at heart.
All this cannot help but influence our sense of what Arbus was searching for in her art. Not unlike Flannery O’Connor, she employed the grotesque as a staging ground in her quest for the transcendent. She remarked that there were things that no one would see unless she photographed them, and it’s obvious, even banal, to note that by taking pictures of people from whom we might instinctively turn away, she was not only allowing us to stare, but insisting that we look beyond the jarring physiognomies of what she termed “singular people.” Studying her portrait of Ronald C. Harrison, you first register “The Human Pincushion,” but then you may find yourself trying to look beyond the needles—to remove them from his face, by sheer force of imagination, in order to figure out what the guy actually looks like.
In Chronology, one of Diane Arbus’s friends refers to the photographer as being headed “to the absolute inside of the inside.” Contemplating her unblinking, fearless portraits, we register all the details of self-presentation and milieu, and yet we keep checking this information against whatever agreement or demurral we read in the subject’s eyes, as if this time we will succeed in seeing beyond them.
Looking through Revelations—revisiting the icons, as it were, in the new light of the artist’s writings—I began to contemplate the existence of something deeper than the psyche and the trappings of personality, more powerful than fear, desire, or aspiration, more formative than the residue of personal history and experience. If there is such an entity as the soul, it could be argued that it is the ultimate object of Arbus’s explorations. Even as we grow more restive with conventional religion, with the intolerance and even brutality it so frequently exacts in trade for meaning and consolation, Arbus’s work can seem like the bible of a faith to which one can almost imagine subscribing—the temple of the individual and irreducible human soul, the church of obsessive fascination and compassion for those fellow mortals whom, on the basis of mere surface impressions, we thoughtlessly misidentify as the wretched of the earth.