Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer

Arthur Lubow

Jonathan Cape, £35

Review by Brian Morton

DIANE ARBUS photographed “normal” people, too, but editors wanted her images of naturists, giants, sideshow freaks, transsexuals, triplets and the mentally impaired, and pragmatism turned into a style that, in turn, revealed a great deal about Arbus herself. It’s important not to forget that she began her career, and found her technique, working in fashion photography with husband Allan Arbus, and that the frozen moments she presents are no less contrived and unnatural than the images characteristically found in Glamour or Vogue. As Diane – pronounced Dee-ann – Nemerov, she enjoyed a wealthy Central Park upbringing. As Diane Arbus, she preferred Coney Island.

Arbus’s suicide in 1971 at just 48 years old established her as an artist of existential anxiety, consistently focused on the strange and the transgressive. This, though, denies other sides of her complex nature. She used to say that she enjoyed photographing triplets because they expressed different aspects of her adolescent self, “each with a tiny difference”. That, of course, is also the essence of a contact sheet: multiple images of almost the same moment, from which the photographer normally chooses the “best”, but from which Arbus frequently chose the most perverse.

Far from being an archetypal street photographer, anonymously stalking subjects, Arbus made friends with them, teased out their stories, even participated in their orgies when her subject was the new permissiveness of the 1960s. One senses from Arthur Lubow’s sympathetic, balanced account that behind her lifelong willingness to experiment sexually – with her brother Howard Nemerov, with women, with strangers – was an essential apartness. “Coldness” won’t do, because Arbus sought contact in the other sense as well, but seems to have been driven by a visual autism.

I was puzzled at first why Lubow had chosen to divide his narrative into so many, very short chapters, 85 of them in just 600 pages, but then it came to me that once he was denied the right to reproduce any Arbus photographs, he had to shape his account as if it were a series of snapshots. What this means is that to appreciate a relatively pricey book, one really needs to have daughter Doon Arbus’s An Aperture Monograph, Untitled or Magazine Work open at the appropriate page. But Lubow does have great and telling pictures of Diane, her family, friends and teachers.

Arbus was far from unschooled, but the main lessons she absorbed, from Israel, from Vienna-born Lisette Model, from August Sander, from Walker Evans and (negatively) from Richard Avedon, who wanted to inhabit the high life while Diane wanted to slum, were moral rather than technical. Friends were often perplexed by the mismatch they saw between the extraordinary stories Diane told about her subjects and the ordinariness of her photographs. She had very little of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ability to invest a single image with complex story lines, but the very careful selection of her images allowed her to convey unsuspected depths beyond pathos. Her photograph of Marilyn Dauria and her fragile family, which included an extremely handicapped boy, has been dismissed as voyeuristic, but even a casual look reveals a certain kind of rudimentary (the word is Diane’s) bonding and reliance; this isn’t a dysfunctional family, but a family that functions in its own painfully loving way.

In a similar way, Arbus’s most famous single photograph, Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962), is a careful selection from an ordinary run of portraits of a well-off kid showing off. It catches him grimacing and clawing his free hand. And in that face we see what was about to happen to his generation of rich kids, caught up in Vietnam service or protest, the Pentagon and Chicago rallies, the Days of Rage and Weatherman. It’s a chilling glimpse of the future. In a more tender way, Eddie Carmel, Jewish Giant, towering over his parents in a tiny (though it isn’t) Bronx home is a reminder of the cuckoo aspect of all parenting. All children are giants and potential terrorists and Arbus had the wit to intuit it. Lubow has wit, too, and a deep affection for his subject. That he is hampered in the most fundamental way, though it is scarcely an unusual handicap for the biographer of a controversial subject, only makes his achievement here the more valuable.