Diane Arbus (39 page)

But at the same time he didn’t want to lose sight of the history or traditions of the medium—possibly a reason he suggested to Diane that she look more closely at Sander’s portraits (although today Szarkowski insists “Diane had already developed her own distinctive way of working”). However, studying Sander was just another step to work more deeply into “the endlessly seductive puzzle of sight.”

August Sander lived in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and from shortly after the First World War until Hitler put an end to his project in 1932 for being “anti-social,” he tried to record and document every archetype in his country—peasants, thieves, lawyers, pastry chefs, artists, Nazis, girls in their confirmation dresses, Jews, doctors, bankers. All his portraits are direct and confrontational, but never threatening. He didn’t want to make anyone look bad. “The portrait is your mirror,” he would say. “It’s you.” So Sander’s sitters would look at him without expression and give him back the sense of self-reflection he wanted. Diane was reminded by Sander that the camera has an infinite capacity to reveal.

She had been thinking about photographing archetypes—indeed, she already had (teen-agers, flower girls, weightlifters)—and often referred to herself as “an anthropologist of sorts.” Lisette Model repeatedly told her that the more specific you are, the more general you’ll be. “I thought if I photographed some generalized human being, everybody would recognize it,” Diane said. “It would be like the Common Man or something.”

Avedon was studying Sander, too—studying the frontal symmetrical compositions, the crucial confrontations with subject matter. Avedon wanted to pursue the prototypical, but he wanted to assemble prototypical celebrities—the instantly recognizable, like Eisenhower and Malcolm X; the bigger, the better. He resented being known as just a fashion photographer, so he was doing a book—his second
*
—and Marvin Israel was designing it and James Baldwin, his high-school classmate, was writing the text. It would deal with America after John Kennedy’s assassination—deal with the loneliness and violence in the country, deal with the rise of civil rights. Avedon’s photographs would range from horrific blurred
candids taken inside a madhouse to marriages at City Hall. There were studies of a naked Allen Ginsberg, a doleful Marilyn Monroe, sinister, sneering pop singers, Arthur Miller with five-o’clock shadow, and harsh portraits of Adlai Stevenson, John L. Lewis, and Bertrand Russell.

Skin—that, oh, so permanent mask—was another focus: skin harshly lit against a bare studio background—aging, flabby, baggy skin, bleary eyes, dry, cracking mouths. Diane usually ignored age in a person’s face, but Avedon in
Nothing Personal
emphasized it—to him, age was a defining condition.

Avedon often had insomnia, and when he couldn’t sleep, he would call Diane and they would talk for hours. Occasionally they attended parties together, armed with their cameras. They photographed a reading that William Burroughs gave at which Larry Rivers, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol were present; they dropped by a fund-raising for Abby Hoffman held on a tenement rooftop—at this gathering the Fugs played obscene songs. They also participated in symposiums at one time or another at the New School along with Cornell Capa and Irving Penn, and they would discuss styles of portraiture. In public, Diane behaved as if she were in awe of Avedon—she would repeat how she envied his technical prowess, how she could never do the things he did.

Once she and Avedon agreed to be part of a workshop Bruce Davidson was holding in his studio on West 12th Street. Davidson had been experiencing a terrible creative block. “Suddenly I could not take a picture—couldn’t hold a camera in my hand,” and he’d been Cartier-Bresson’s protégé and with the prestigious Magnum photo agency for close to a decade. Famous for his pictures of Freedom Riders, the first moon launching at Cape Canaveral—“but suddenly I couldn’t touch a light meter—a piece of film,” he says. “Maybe it had something to do with the break-up of my first marriage or that I’d just had a lousy time trying to make it big as a fashion photographer.” For whatever reasons, he was teaching, “trying to get my creative juices going again.” He’d selected ten students from various walks of life—among them a suburban housewife, a retired businessman, and a high-school dropout named John Gossage, who’d spent most of his time memorizing the entire photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Gossage went on to become a fine photographer as well as a special friend of Diane’s.

“And I asked Kertesz, Avedon, and Arbus to participate by showing their work for an evening,” Davidson says. “Kertesz brought his photographs of a naked man sitting on a rock, a woman in repose on a sofa, a cloud next to a tall building. Avedon showed his pictures of tormented patients in a mental hospital, an unmasked look at Marilyn Monroe. Diane
brought in her portraits of an overweight family lying naked in a meadow, midgets posed in a bedroom, and a widow sitting in her ornate bedroom. Each photographer gave clues to their inner worlds.”

After one class, Davidson says, “Diane and I went for a walk around the Village and she began discussing Erich Salomon’s candid snapshots, and Jacques Henri Lartigue, who’d been photographing in France since he was a kid-before World War I.” Lartigue was fascinated by movement and he’d been recording it for almost fifty years—with enormous exuberance and a sense of the ridiculous: cars racing, people and dogs leaping, jumping, falling, caught in mid-air. “Diane started making me aware of the history of photography,” Davidson says, but still he couldn’t photograph.

A few weeks passed and Diane invited him to Atlantic City, ostensibly to see a burlesque show with her, but he sensed she was trying to get him interested in looking at the world again. He agreed to go with her, but said he wouldn’t take any pictures, although through force of habit he brought along his camera. As they drove across the George Washington Bridge and later through the tackiness of the old summer resort, he resisted looking out the window, though passing the Boardwalk he thought he could smell saltwater taffy. They attended the burlesque show, sitting through endless routines featuring flabby strippers and bad comics. Afterward Diane went backstage and showed Davidson where she’d photographed—in the dusty wings and filthy, airless dressing rooms.

For the rest of the afternoon they drove around a series of smog-covered little towns, very quiet in the heat, pausing for a while by the ocean, which was blood red in color. “I’ll never forget it,” Davidson says. A foul odor drifted through the thick, hot breeze. Air and water were obviously polluted, but nobody knew about pollution yet or that factories were dumping their wastes improperly. It was so hot that crowds were paddling about, despite the scarlet waters, and Diane took pictures of some of the bathers, who glared straight into her camera as she talked to them.

“You’re better taking pictures of people looking in the opposite direction,” she told Davidson, who had a sudden urge to photograph the bathers
his
way. But he didn’t, and it was getting late, so they started to walk back to the car, past a gas station and a motel. Suddenly they came upon a squat pastel stucco house set back from the highway on an incline. Behind the house was a yard filled with ugly plaster statues. A truck roared by, and with that Davidson started click-clicking away at the landscape with his camera. Then a fat lady with crazy eyes waddled into view shouting angrily that this was private property and she chased him away. Diane began to laugh and they ran back to the car. Later they parked by a lake
“which did not have red water.” Davidson took a picture of Diane in her bathing suit. “Diane loved to swim.”

After that day Davidson slowly began photographing again. “I don’t know what happened—can’t describe it—except maybe Diane turned me on to the screwball aspect of the world.” He started photographing the New Jersey meadows, topless waitresses, West Coast trailer camps. Periodically he would drop by Diane’s house for coffee or he would join her when she had supper with Lisette Model. “God, those two women had a strong bond!” he says. “Reminded me of a mother and daughter.” (Model always denied this, but there was a parent/child aspect to the relationship. Diane hung on her every word; Model in turn treated Diane with extreme tenderness, like the child she’d never had.)

Model was fifty-seven now, but she looked older; her sturdy little body was quite bent, her hair snow white. However, her attitude toward people remained wary and intensely curious. She still spent most evenings sitting in Village cafés gossiping with old friends like Berenice Abbott.

Model was currently the most famous photography teacher in America (her students ranged from Larry Fink to Eva Rubinstein), but she had not taken a picture in over a decade. No one dared ask why, but Bob Cato, who’d worked with her at
Bazaar,
says, “Lisette had been intimidated by Avedon and Penn—by their energy, their aggressiveness. Lisette was shy, ‘Mittel-European’—she couldn’t make small talk with editors, with advertising types. It was unbelievably tough in the marketplace. It’s even rougher now, but back then—in the 1950s-’60s, when the photography community was smaller, more intimate, and everybody knew everybody—you still had to fight and struggle to get an assignment. Lisette couldn’t push herself.” (Model maintained that she never turned down work, but that her images were too strong for the magazines.)

So she invested most of her time and thought in her classes at the New School, and she taught Diane everything she knew. That is to say, she taught her that there are no pat answers or easy solutions to anything in art, and that every photographer
sees
differently (“some are instinctive, some are just strong”); seeing is a process of learning, and the main point is that you have to care passionately about your subject matter or forget it. Diane was the photographer Model envisioned herself becoming. Diane was fragile as a person but strong as an artist, and Model respected that because she, too, was a combination of delicacy and power. Model understood that many of Diane’s photographs had to be taken in order to relieve her mind of the faces and night worlds that were haunting it. Through some mysterious, unconscious force Diane was starting to create in her pictures a kind of art that would be both a release and a vindication of her
life, and Model more than anyone understood this. So she encouraged Diane to brood for weeks about a subject—as she did with a young mother who resembled Elizabeth Taylor and had a retarded son. She’d noticed them on the subway and followed them home, and when she spoke to the woman about photographing her, the woman told her maybe but that she’d have to check with her mother first.

If a subject obsessed her enough, Diane would carefully go about gaining the cooperation and confidence of that person until—as in the case of the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike—she felt relaxed enough to pose. Diane treated almost everybody the same way—she was invariably cheerful and unjudgmental and had no pretensions about what she was doing, demanding self-revelation of herself as the price of the self-revelation of her subjects. This often left her exhausted after a session.

Until recently Diane had brought all her work to Model for criticism, but lately she’d told her, “Whenever I photograph, you’re looking over my shoulder, Lisette.” So for a while Model didn’t go over her contact sheets or enlargements. However, their friendship grew more intense. Diane confided in her as she confided in no one else. (“Oh—what she told me! Things I will never repeat!”) She talked about her daughters and their future, her continued dependence on Allan, her complicated feelings toward Marvin Israel, whom Model did not get to know until a decade later
*
when Aperture asked him to design Model’s book of photographs.

Model worried about Diane’s need to live in a constant state of euphoria. “She had to be flying—and sometimes she was, but sometimes she wasn’t. She became so depressed she’d rub her hand back and forth across my table and her voice was like a five-year-old girl’s.”

Evsa Model worried about his wife’s shifting moods; after being with Diane for several hours she would be drained. He didn’t like her spending so much time with Diane—he felt she was being exploited. To which Model would argue that such a thing didn’t exist. “Let me be exploited,” she would cry.

For the past two years Diane had been scribbling encouraging notes to the young pacifist Paul Salstrom, who was serving time in prison for refusing to register for the draft. He would write back, he says, “telling her of my plans to live off the land—to buy a farm, which I eventually did. I wanted
to travel, too, and I used to encourage her to travel more—open up her life. Once I told her to go to Iceland to photograph the Eskimos. Maybe because
I
wanted to go to Iceland myself. I wanted her to photograph the communes some of my friends were starting in New England—the demonstrations against the war—the Diggers…the kids who were living in the desert with their gurus—but she wasn’t interested in that. She seemed more interested in stuff that was close to home.”

When he got out of prison in May of 1964, Salstrom came through New York and visited Diane’s Charles Street house. “It was a sunny weekend,” he recalls. “Diane’s brother, Howard Nemerov, was sitting there in the courtyard with his wife, Peggy. He seemed to be a kindly, courtly man. He talked about what it means to be a pacifist and how Robert Lowell had been a pacifist in the Second World War… It was the anniversary of David Nemerov’s death, so Howard and Diane spoke a little bit about their father to me.” Before he left, Diane showed Salstrom a big looseleaf book filled with her scribblings. There were pictures, snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings—like a collage. She envisioned it as a book she might someday publish—it would be called “Family Album.”

Compiling births, deaths, marriages, accidents, crises of the Russek and Nemerov clans and also the Arbuses—to her this was a most basic form of history. Diane was captivated not only by the number and variation and rearrangement of her images, but by the
connections
between her old photographs, moldering letters, clips, postcards. It was not just a story, but a story to which
her life
belonged.