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History of Photography
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Diane Arbus and the past when she was good

To cite this article: Ian Jeffrey (1995) Diane Arbus and the past when she was good, History of Photography, 19:2, 95-99,
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1995.10442403

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.1995.10442403

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 Diane Arbus and the Past
When She Was Good
Ian Jeffrey
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What was her project? To mythologize American society. Model's carnal New Objectivity of the late 1930s to Arbus's
Patricia Bosworth makes this claim in her biography of cathartic manner of the 1960s. Model's portraits, though,
Diane Arbus, and apropos of her training at Fieldston were determined by quite particular political conditions.
School in the 1930s: 'For the rest of her life, Diane savored She was a European observer working at a time when social
words like "quest," "aristocracy," "rituals," "legends," and pictorial norms were being broadcast and enforced in
"kingdom," and she began to view the world in mythic newly totalitarian societies. Her ungainly subjects were
terms. Later she would see the ritual, the myth, in visual conspicuously superfluous and anachronistic in the new
spectacles such as parades, contests, circuses, dances and culture of workers and athletes, and referred back to the
weddings, and such backgrounds would be a source for her encumbered subjects of, for example, Otto Dix in Weimar
photography.' 1 But what were her intentions? To keep that Germany. Model's disfigured characters belonged to that
society from banality? earlier unsupervised age, superseded in the late 1930s by
One of the problems- and attractions- of Arbus's more hygienic orders.
career is that the work centers on the eighty pictures Photographers' preoccupations with those on the out-
published by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel in the Aperture side, with the abnormal, the superfluous and the outcast
monograph of 1972. Doon Arbus remarked, in abstaining became marked from 1930 onwards, and largely in opposi-
from the biography, that 'the work speaks for itself'. 2 The tion to the assertions of normative and utopian photo-
biography does nothing to dislodge that judgement, and by graphy. Documentarists of clochards and of the destitute
implication endorses the selection of 1972. were ostensibly on the side of social improvement, but at the
But what does it usually mean to say that the work same time they were attracted by the unassimilable as
speaks for itself? It is an invitation to be silent, or at least to symbols of resistance in a coercive culture. But why should
keep from analysis and discussion; and in Arbus's case that is Arbus have been interested in this kind of photography in
a sensible injunction. The book of 1972 might have been the 1960s? She was a New Yorker working in that city, and
meant to discourage historians and critics. It is not chronolo- not a European emigree victimized by totalitarianism. The
gically arranged and implies- probably rightly- that answer is that she, too, was subject to coercive and norma-
chronology is not much of an issue in the 1960s. Then, the tive pressures, except that they were social rather than
pictures are given in isolation, one to an opening, which political. In these circumstances the example of Model's
makes comparison difficult- and that too discourages talk. New Objectivity was apposite.
Isolation, which is also the rule in the nineteen pictures put Nor is Arbus completely anomalous when seen in
out in Picture Magazine in 1980, is probably dictated by the relation to native American traditions. Her milder pictures,
images themselves, which are mostly centralized, hieratic for instance, can be compared, without great strain, to those
and sparing of details. There are often invitations to close of Walker Evans in American Photographs (1938). Evans,
looking, but rarely to working out. In this respect the fascinated by modernism, attended to the relationship
pictures don't flattter empiricists. Nor, in the absence of between individuals and social norms as expressed in cos-
strongly metaphoric motifs, is there any great appeal to tume and uniform. Typical passages in America11 Photographs
poetics. There are, it is true, topical references to Vietnam, trace the transition from childhood into adolescence as an
but Arbus was never a history artist as might have been said accommodation to costume. Individuality seen"lS to survive
of Andy Warhol and of Roy Lichtenstein. the passage. What Evans notes is a coming to terms with
But do the pictures speak for themselves? In terms of social expectations. Arbus, too, sometimes distanced herself
photography history, Arbus is no mystery. How could she in the manner of Evans, especially in her pictures of tyros:
be, with such a distinctive tutor as Lisette Model? From 1958 two learner cigarette-smokers in Central Park, for instance,
she was a student of Model. Everything in the book of 1972 and a couple of teenage dance champions from Yonkers.
post-dates that meeting. There are evident continuities from The difference between Evans in the l 930s and Arbus in

IllS TORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, VoLUMF. 19, NUMHF.R 2, SUMMER JlJ95 0308-7~'!8/'!5 SIIUXI 1~'> 1'!95 Taylor & Francis Ltd. 95
 Ia11 Jeffrey

the 1960s is that where the one allows for continuities the and made the more poignant. It is an unusually poetic image
other stresses isolation. Evans's uniformed personnel are part of 1963 published in Picture Magazine in 1980, a young
of a larger order extended overleaf to the whole of Ameri- woman seated on a balk of timber at the river's edge cradles
can society; Arbus's beginners, on the other hand, have been her lover's head, while he smiles complaisantly for the
marooned, often in relation to dangerous and uncertain camera and holds a portable radio upright, near to his
destinies. The Yonkers dancers, for example, have come to a genitals. It may evoke Arcady at sunset, but in those details
premature adulthood in an empty theatre in the company of the writing is already on the wall. She was a sceptic, where
kitsch tropics. Despite such distinctions Arbus is still identifi- ideals were concerned, although at the same time scepticism
able as an American photographer, interested in the con- allowed her to entertain and to negotiate ideals. Where a
spectus: families, workers, patriots, children, matriarchs. resolutely post-romantic photographer might have repre-
This tradition-conscious aspect of her work is enhanced by sented aspirants to glamour, strength and beauty as dupes, as
the collection of 1972. By comparison the Picture Magazine consumers of a code given in bad faith, Arbus regrets the
series of 1980 projects a more heterogeneous aesthetic, more fall, and in her disclosures reinstates the power of the myth
lyrical and surreal. now faded into stereotype and cliche.
Her tactic was to invoke and then to endanger the She was sceptical with regard to love which, subject to
normative by parody and disproportion. This is evident longueurs and distractions, would not last for ever. Beauty
enough in her more emphatic paradoxes, in the shape of too, in her scheme of things, was a distant ideal, more often
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comely women who tum out to be men- and vice versa. honoured than achieved. Woman was a showpiece, and a
But it is evident even where the story-line is less marked. victim of images contrived on her behalf; man was at heart a
The famous picture of twins, for instance, used on the front frightened creature condemned to boldness. If the arrange-
of the book of 1972, looks composed, and is comparable to ment of 1972 is to be credited, she had misgivings about the
August Sander's studious pairings of the 1920s. Sander, whole schema, from the cradle to the grave. She was an
though, liked to present intact figures, whereas Arbus's antinomian at every stage: infants dribble and gape, adoles-
twins are without ankles and feet. Then, the ncar-symmetry cence is autism, marriage is separation- and nature a
asks for a comparison and delivers a left hand mysteriously photo-mural in a hotel lobby.
darkened and diminished in the folds of a dark smock. Was the schema itself objectionable to her? Why did she
Society, with its power to stereotype, was ubiquitous. It care? Perhaps bathos allowed her to keep the schema in
was an affront in so far as it was ubiquitous and complacent, being and to think of society- as a whole? Clearly she was
and as an affront it prompted a riposte. Arbus's pictures look interested in mere appearances, in Hollywood's fake fa~ades
like those of a romantic, set both on revenge and redemp- and portable rock outcrops. Artifice was attractive, and an
tion. She was an observer not to be taken in, someone who astonishing part of the ambience in which she moved. But in
knew of the worm in the bud. In one of her more ordinary her most authoritative pictures artifice and presence go
pictures, from 1968, of a fine, painted woman in a fleecy together, and artifice is quickly seen through to flesh and to
coat on a bed in NYC, the embodiment of charm lies the innocent and puzzled eyes of many of her subjects.
among some discreetly deranged signs: an inverted land- Artifice was important in her project as the term that
scape painting, a cameo of a sailboat, a camel on a packet invoked reading. A picture on a wall, a locket, the cut of a
and a brimming ashtray, emblem of boredom. In that dress and a hairstyle are all social markers which can be
picture she deconstructs the idea of glamour, and infiltrates identified and placed with certainty, and as such all are
memories of waiting. It is a tyical procedure, less in the sense immediately subordinated by the charisma of
of being a total demystification than of contaminating a presence-which is the other, and primary, term in her
demystification with her own nostalgias. A blonde in eye project.
shadow and black tights is little more than a starlet-in- What happens in the majority of instances is that a
waiting; within the broader context of a more glamorous milieu is evoked, one which could readily serve as a
elsewhere and a tedious, lingering present, she becomes a sociological exercise ground, and then disturbed by cathar-
princess in the making. sis, embodied in an encounter with some excessive identity.
Evans's aspirants in the 1930s matured into secure social She may even have been at odds with the documentary
roles; they grew up and achieved a more confident sense of habit where encounters are necessarily kept in check in the
themselves. Arbus's candidates, on the other hand, will interests of an understanding of context. There are, for
never find any refuge in maturity. As Evans and his example, those three striking pictures of young children
contemporaries saw it, maturity was a value with something dispersed in the selection of 1972. In documentary picture-
of the heroic and the completed about it, and Main Street taking children always feature as representatives, as markers
was hallowed ground. 3 Arbus, though, allowed nothing of in a family setting or as vivid emblems of a future. Arbus's
that. Maturity, on her evidence, brought isolation and children, by contrast, are pungently individualized, and
confusion: in the opening beyond that given to the reclining portrayed virtually as adults. Ideas of childhood are retained,
woman with her cigarette stubs an elderly couple (NYC, but kept in abeyance, overcome in the immediacy of the
1969) endure their distress separately, with the woman's encounter.
state of mind given by proxy in the dark convolutions of an She was interested less in the American typology than
astrakhan coat. in types in general. Her young, naive patriots are successors
Dreams, it is clear, will be both fouled by circumstances to Evans's adolescent social seekers in America11 Photographs

96
 Diane Arbus a11d tile Past

and elsewhere there are likely prototypes in Weegee, Bunny In the 1930s identity was compatible with culture and then
Yeager and vernacular portraiture. But the twins have their in the 1940s it was figured as energy. Frank's citizens in the
antecedents in August Sander, and the pale-eyed tatooed 1950s, however, tend to be passive recipients of screened and
man of 1970 is a Mephistopheles ascending out of shadow. broadcast information. To Frank's successors identity is
Or with his unfurled eagle, stars and snake he may be meant dissolved in culture, and that process of dissolution becomes
as something like a Native American manque- for illus- their subject. Arbus and Davidson then suggest an alterna-
trators in the seventeenth century often picked up on tive in whch identity is lodged in and encumbered by the
tattooing as a characteristic of the original peoples of material: Davidson's subjects are continuous with the palp-
America. The point is rather that her cast look like types able shadows amongst which they live, and Arbus shows
even if the details cannot be certified. many of hers weighed down by flesh.
The pictures, though, are not to be explained away. Her work is unusual in photography and anachronistic
They have an ethical dimension, acknowledged by Doon in the sense that it recalls that of Sander and of the New
Arbus admitting that 'the work speaks for itself'. Thm the Objectivity of the 1920s, but its terms arc those of the 1960s.
last seven pictures in the collection of 1972 arc of mentally She is closer in her outlook to, for instance, Philip Roth than
infirm people involved in a festival. Any analysis of the to the majority of her contemporaries in photography. They
details of these portraits would be beside the point, for the already presumed that identity was well on the way to being
masquers live outside the social realm in a rudimentary dissolved in the paraphernalia of culture, and set themselves
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happy land. In the documentary portraits, objective com- to register that dissolution. Perhaps because of her back-
mentary is also restrained by the etiquette attached to ground as a daughter and mother in an extended and
portraiture. Where a likeness has been contracted and insistent family she identified a different set of pressures. In
vouchsafed, analysis would amount to a solecism. Even 1967 in a Newsweek interview she accounted for her late start
where commentary is called for as unavoidable it can touch in photography: 'Because a woman spends the first block of
on the unbearable and demeaning. This seems to be one of her life looking for a husband and learning to be a wife and
the implications of her picture of a svelte topless dancer mother, just trying to get these roles down pat; you don't
taken in San Francisco in 1968. Her melancholy is justified have time to play another role. ' 5
by her knowledge that she is a function of her appearance, The Bosworth biography teems with evidence of that
signalled by an index finger which props and displays her sort. Basically it is evidence of external definition by
breast, in a re-enactment of the raised finger of Leonardo's attentive relatives and friends. The photography of the
Thomas shown on the dresser top beyond. Arbus's insights, 1960s, if understood in the context of that judgemental and
that is to say, often propose sad news of solitude, disfigure- prying ambience, represents an escape into the inscrutable.
ment and disappointment, and in this respect douse the A good proportion of Arbus's prime actors from the 1960s
sociological impulse on behalf of a muter sympathy and exist well beyond the reach of the kind of conventional
acknowledgement. morality recounted in the Bosworth history. They have
It might be argued, in fact, that Arbus's work stands at either, as ultra-modernists, constructed outre new identities
the end of a tradition and constitutes one of the last attempts for themselves, or restructured around an outstanding trait.
to make a humanitarian art- against the odds. The street She shows them either escaped into an exceptional freedom,
tradition had been used up, and what remained was Apoca- beyond interference, or as over-determined caricatures, like
lypse. It was no accident that Lisette Model, with her the Vietnam patriots. Although the patriots and her other
European ties from the 1930s, should have been an regular citizens arc over-burdened by the couture and
influence, for she testified to a time when -;:,k)tc;~ca phy was styling of the moment and represent the culture at large,
of consequence. And Robert Frank's book, Tile Ameriwns, cathartically pictured, they can-just as easily- be seen as
photography's major monument from the 1950s, also surrogates in her own coercive family drama: 'Mommy
deserves to be considered as a post-totalitarian and post- keeps telling me to wear my galoshes in the rain and I don't
holocaust work, so completely is it given over to an want to anymore.' 6
iconography of control and submission. 4 Bruce Davidson's It was around the family that ethics were most con-
East 1OOth Street, published in 1970, envisages a different spicuously negotiated in the 1960s. East 1OOtil Street, for
kind of catastrophe, one in which a population of survivors example, is a family saga which remarks on a decline from
inhabits a darkness articulated by architectural details. Des- the ensemble to solitude. Davidson's couples take as little
pite looking like a survey, Davidson's book delivers an delight in each other as any of Arbus's, and for both of them
atmosphere rather than an analysis, and some of its terms are loneliness can be a dismal state. For Roth, who scrutinized
close to those used by Arbus. Both artists, for example, some of Arbus 's favoured social milieux- and at the same
remark on expressionless decors- Arbus's in Levittown, time, the family in Lettit1g Go (196'2) harboured inflexible
1963. cultural expectations of the kind identified time and again
Davidson's survivors exist awkwardly in oppressive and by Bosworth. Roth, of course, is no more systematizing
vertiginous spaces and, threatened as they are, demand to be than Arbus, and as ambivalent; alternatives are stated rather
taken seriously. Arbus's arc shown as figments of her than preferred. His sympathies, if any, lie with those who
imagination and as actors in a social drama where identity is make the best of the various bad jobs provided for them by
either hard won or not won at all. The question of identity, providence. There might be a moral order about which one
and of its disappearance, mattered in the ethos of the 1960s. can be reasonably sure in abstract, but survival requires

l)7
 Ian Jeffrey

adjustments, which is the moral of When She Was Good, his Picture Magazine, of Siamese twins preserved in a bottle and
tragedy of 1967. put on display.
The point about Roth the writer, apropos of Arbus the Her work might, in fact, be understood as part of her
photographer, is his attitude to ambivalence. He is unable to own argument with her family and its values. In brief, she
decide, and demonstrates what happens in the process. With was projected as a beautiful and talented scion of a dis-
the moral question as insistent as insoluble he turns, instead, tinguished family; she would go on to marry well and
to what can be known and described, and his books alternate become a successful mother. These are the kinds of expec-
between irreconcilable family scenes and gratuitous descrip- tations which come easily to the lips of Bosworth's inter-
tions. Somewhere within the body of the text the code viewees. She was brought up, that is to say, in a world
delivers its injunctions, but in the meantime the everyday unusually rich in expectations, which constituted her story
unfolds in its own heterogeneous way. The code with its in advance. In the Newsweek interview of 1967 she drew
injunctions is for both of them a necessary impossibility. attention to that compliance, and in the recording of
Behind the multifarious surfaces ofRoth's novels lie ideas of 1970-71, published as a foreword to the book of 1972, she
the good life in which decisions are correctly taken. Under- also shows herself rebelling against expectations. She was
pinning Arbus's world is, perhaps, an image of paradise, or said, for instance, to be talented and then described herself
of those 'rituals' and 'legends' remarked by Bosworth. This giving up art on exactly those grounds. The whole drift of
is how she looked back in 1970-71 on her experience in that talk to students is to deny her gifts, to present herself as a
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nudist camps in the early 1960s: ' ... it gets to seem as if way barely adequate operative imposed on by an astonishing
back in the Garden of Eden after the fall Adam and Eve reality to which she can make little difference. The talented,
begged the Lord to forgive them ... and in his boundless and patronized, adolescent has been obliterated by the
exasperation he'd said all right then, stay in the Garden. Get dispassionate medium and its extraordinary subjects.
civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.' 7 The The family story of fulfilment and cohesion is denied at
evidence, especially in the shape of that antediluvian family all points. Children, on whom the story depends, end up at
resting by the tail fin of an automobile, might be evidence of best as pungent and gargantuan, and at worst as specimens in
a fall from grace, but at the same time is a way of keeping a bottle. The beautiful girl becomes a melancholy topless
the idea of grace in being, even if only negatively. dancer, and the older woman a survivor waiting in a
But how is her photography meant? Roth, in his furnished room. She remarks consistently on these inverted
stories, writes exhaustively on characters in their settings, as destinies, as if the inversion might guard against the failure
if he were an anthropologist assembling evidence. Observa- of the dream. This makes sense if it is remembered that
tion was a way of extending the space between caesuras and Arbus's work, as defined in the book of 1972, is all post-
catastrophes, which take place off stage and at other times. traumatic, following on both the collapse of her marriage to
Arbus, by contrast, was a photographer of the catastrophe, Allan Arbus and the closure of the family business.
or of the cathartic moment, which surmounts and puts a In Wlten She Was Good (1967) Philip Roth describes a
term to talk. Bosworth, in a passage on the nudist phase, predicament close to that of Diane Arbus. Roth's leading
remarks on her polishing her stories 'by repeating them over lady in that novel lives subject to an idealizing imagination
and over again to Marvin Israel, her daughters, and in relation to which the world of actualities is hopelessly
friends'. 8 Talk was, perhaps, an emblem of an everyday life flawed. In the end she dies, symbolically, in frost and snow.
whose banality could be dispersed in the face of a conclusive The book is throughly reminiscent of the Arbus reuvre, and
image. This, for instance, is how she reported on one especially so at some points. The adolescent idealist, for
epiphany in the home of the giant Eddie Carmel: 'You instance, withdraws from the school band empowered by a
know how every mother has nightmares when she's preg- suggestive phrase: 'But she simply couldn't march any more
nant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that with those girls- they were freaks.' 11 Of the three freaks in
in the mother's face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking "OH question, one was wall-eyed, one stammered and the other
MY GOD, NO!" '9 was grossly overweight. It recalls Arbus in her lecture of
But is there a key to the whole of Arbus's reuvre? In the 1970-71: 'Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was
biography Bosworth attaches justifiable weight to child- one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific
hood influences, to experience of Goya and El Greco and to kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them.''
reading of, for example, Grimm's fairy stories and Alice in When She Was Good is a catalogue of imperfections: a
Wonderland. 1 0 Although the selection of 1972 does consti- scrambled love affair, shallow boastfulness, failed businesses,
tute a picaresque excursion through a world turned upside unrealized intentions and marital hypocrisies. Roth himself
down it is hardly accounted for by Goya, Grimm and sides with imperfection as constituting the fabric of life in
Carroll. Childhood enchantment may have been important, society. His idealist, Lucy, protests, and finds the discrepancy
but its importance is outweighed, on Bosworth's evidence, intolerable. She seeks to impose her vision by force of words
by that of early adulthood in which Arbus was a citizen, and by will. Arbus starts from a similar point, although the
wife and mother. The photographer's words on Eddie vision is less hers than that of her part of the culture. But her
Carmel are those of a mother remembering the traumas of tactic, diametrically opposed to that of Roth's Lucy, is one
child-bearing. And a number of her pictures could be put of radical acceptance of every figure that goes to constitute
under the heading from her nudist memories: 'Procreate. the flawed world. It is as if Lucy had opted, as part of her
Muck it up'. There is a striking picture from 1961, given in therapy, to take her writer's part, to see her hesitant and

98
 Diane Arbus and the Past

finally catastrophic love affair for what it was, to cherish the Notes
failure and the hypocrisy and the idle dreaming. Arbus,
giving an account of herself, can often sound like someone 1. Patricia Bosworth, Dim~e Arb11s: A Biograpl•y, Heinemann: London
1985, 29.
submitting to a self-imposed therapy, going against the 2. Ibid., preface, xi.
grain at the dictates of a will at least as strong as that of 3. For a series of eight more or less heroic folk by Walker Evans,,sce 'In
Bridgeport's War Factories', Fort•mc (September 1941), 88-89.
Roth's heroine. Photography was a test and her way of
4. This is an inevitable, but so far unrehearsed, reading of The Americans.
facing up to that complex, fascinating and disappointing 5. Bosworth, 81-82.
reality described by Roth: 'But in a way this scrutiny has to 6. Ibid., 58.
7. Ibid., 195-56.
do with not evading facts, not evading what it really looks
8. Ibid., 195.
like.' 12 Both writer and photographer put their faith in 9. Ibid., 194.
reality, or in an acceptance of things as they imperfectly are. 10. Ibid., e.g. 29, 219.
11. Philip Roth, When Sl1e Was Good, Random House: New York 1967,
The difference, though, was that the photographer was also
88 in the Penguin reprint of 1975.
a player in her own drama, her own leading lady, subject to 12. Diane Arb11s, edited and designed by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel,
those very stresses that the writer describes. New York 1972, foreword from tapes of Diane Arbus's classes taken
by Ikko Narahara.
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99