Diane Arbus (51 page)

Diane could not get over how outspoken and aggressive Ti Grace had been in her behalf. Ti Grace remembers that when they met, “Suddenly Diane asked me in a fresh, naive way if the reason I’d asked for her as my photographer was that I wanted her sexually; that was okay with her, she said. I was stunned. Here I was recognizing her for her work and she thought I was recognizing her sexually. It was cockeyed. I repeated that I’d suggested her because I admired her as an artist. The subject of sex never came up again.”

In the middle of March, Ti Grace flew to Providence to speak on radical feminism and Diane went with her. After the lecture they went back to a motel, and some of the audience followed, “to pour out their torments.” For the next few hours Ti Grace listened as wives and widows, mothers and divorcees, spoke of loneliness and depression and lack of identity; spoke of being victimized, of missing opportunities, of too many kids. “The stories were heartbreaking,” Ti Grace says.

Diane took pictures, but mostly sat in a corner, listening, watching. After the women left, Ti Grace was eager for her opinion, but Diane was surprisingly unsympathetic, almost contemptuous. “She said she couldn’t imagine laying out her hard times on anyone. I told her it’s sometimes easier to tell your troubles to a stranger. ‘Those women are weak,’ Diane answered.” What it boiled down to, she went on, for all their harangues about abolishing marriage and motherhood, was getting their men to take
on a share of the housework and child-rearing drudgery—and that she could understand.

“I felt Diane was defensive about what she’d heard—that she’d been threatened by what the women said. It hit too close to home. At one point she did admit, ‘I was trying to hold my marriage together. I let ten years go by before I really started working at my own career. But it was my fault. I don’t blame anybody but myself,’ she said.

“I felt Diane was into absolutes,” Ti Grace says. “And she wasn’t particularly introspective. She kept a distance not just from me but from herself. And she didn’t want to get into the conflict between being creative and free and traditional female role-playing. She couldn’t understand my choice of living alone, without a man. To her, to be a woman living without a man was to be something of a failure.”

For the rest of the weekend Diane shot rolls and rolls of color film on Ti Grace Atkinson for the prospective
Newsweek
cover. “It was absolutely exhausting. We’d photograph for hours, then go out for a snack, then come back and start photographing again. Every so often we’d take a break, lie on the twin beds, and talk—very intensely. Diane complained about constantly scrounging for jobs and having to do fashion stuff, interrupting her own projects, which she hated doing.”

By the end of the weekend Diane was unsatisfied—she felt that none of the hundreds of pictures she’d taken was in any way revealing. “We both wanted a picture of me as Everywoman,” Ti Grace says. “We kept trying to get the right light. I have very pale skin and Diane was afraid I’d look too washed out. I suggested going into the bathroom—the white tiles…water. I thought if I got into a tub, the water would reflect the light…nothing like being naked in a warm bath to get you relaxed. We both got very excited—because it was risky. Diane was click-clicking away. ‘Nothing shows, does it?’ I kept asking. ‘Nothing shows. It’s just a head shot,’ Diane assured me. It was okay, she said. I thought she knew exactly what she was doing.”

When they got back to New York, Diane delivered all her film to
Newsweek
to be processed. Weeks went by and she heard nothing. Ti Grace knew the Women’s Liberation story was about ready for publication, so she phoned the art department and demanded to know why there had been no reaction to the pictures. Aren’t they going to be used? she asked. There was a silence and then one of the art directors murmured that he wasn’t quite sure what kind of political statement Diane Arbus was trying to make, and no, they weren’t going to use the pictures; an illustration would be used for the cover instead.

Ti Grace asked
Newsweek
to send the color pictures to her, which was
done. Then she phoned Diane to hop a cab to her apartment on Park Avenue. For the next few hours they pored over the pictures—including dozens of beautiful frontal nudes of Ti Grace Atkinson smiling up from the clear, rippling water, and
“everything was showing,”
Ti Grace says. “And Diane acted flabbergasted—shocked. I guess it would have been pretty revolutionary to use one of those pictures for a cover of
Newsweek.
But they are absolutely gorgeous pictures.”

Newsweek
did pay Diane well for her work, and in the article itself they used her head shot of Ti Grace lecturing to a group of women.

Ti Grace did not see Diane after that; she became intrigued with Joe Columbo, the Mafia boss, and the two of them joined forces—she to support the Italian American Civil Rights League, he to help women (he took to wearing a
FREE A FEMINIST
button in his lapel). Periodically, though, Ti Grace would have long conversations with Diane on the phone. “She seemed to be drowning. She kept telling me, ‘Here I am recognized as an artist, but I can’t make a living as a photographer.’ ”

Although it was easier now to get work exhibited in galleries (which didn’t pay until the prints were sold), it appeared to Diane that the better she became as a photographer, the more well known, the fewer magazine assignments she got. And there seemed to be no more grants available to her.

It was particularly frustrating because by 1970—liberated by the Pill, feminism, and federal funding—women artists in general were starting to be self-supporting. And, not so coincidentally, their creations—such as Eva Hesse’s rope-and-cloth hangings, Nancy Grossman’s powerful leather heads, and the androgynous sculptures of Mary Frank—were full of self-revelation.

But Diane had chosen a different route. In a era of self-revelation her work was detached and impenetrable; she refused to be lumped together with Frank and Grossman (much as she liked and respected them) as a “woman artist.” “I’m a
photographer,”
she insisted, although, paradoxically, she was the only woman to achieve status in what had been an all-male photography clique (its members included Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson). This meant, of course, that she would have to go it alone. Her femaleness just complicated the issue, raised the stakes. She had less room in which to maneuver (and she didn’t know how to play power games anyway) and fewer alternatives to fall back on. And no desire to make films like Frank, or teach like Winogrand, or get into industrial photography, which Bruce Davidson
was starting to do and which was the most lucrative of all, apart from advertising.

Eventually John Szarkowski paid Diane a fee to help edit a show of newspaper photographs he was planning to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “Iconography of the
Daily News
.” For the next six months—until July 1970—she went to the
Daily News
three days a week and worked with Eugene Ferrara, who headed the photo department there. “Diane began with the file of pictures starting with Beverly Aadland and she got through G… She rarely spoke to me—always wore the same outfit: denim skirt, shirt, and jacket. And she always ate at the Automat by herself.”

This study of news photography was an extension of her interest in the snapshot as art—as a revelation, a recapitulation, a paradox. To Peter Crookston she wrote that editing the pictures was “funny to do. Some of the things are glorious. Yesterday I found a picture of a lady looking lathered as if for a shave sitting cloaked in white between a doctor and a nurse. All For Beauty’s Sake, it is called… Harriet Heckman submits to plastic surgery by Dr. Nathan Smilie of Phila. as nurse assists. (5/21/35) Miss Heckman has asked for the perfect face and perfect figure and announces she is perfectly willing to face death to attain them. ‘I want to do something about a body and face that have made me miserable,’ she says.”

By 1970, although she didn’t often speak of it, Diane had decided to go beyond photographing ordinary people trying to project different images to the world (like her portrait of the middle-aged woman dressed like a teen-ager). Now she was concentrating on photographing retardates—middle-aged retardates at a home in Vineland, New Jersey. She was fascinated by their “extreme innocence,” their total lack of self-consciousness. They paid no attention to her when she was photographing them. In front of her cameras they behaved like bizarre, overgrown kids, and their actions were unpredictable—they were either hyperactive or terribly slowed down. They would often make noises—eerie gurglings, yelps, squeals—while they frolicked clumsily on the grass. Their complete absorption in what they were doing—whether it was trying on funny hats or pulling at each other’s hair—delighted and moved her. She went back to photograph them again and again.

She had gone on changing cameras—in order to change her images. As usual, she asked Avedon for advice. Hiro, who was still sharing Avedon’s studio, said he’d started using a Pentax—he loved the way it worked. And he didn’t use a flash. Diane borrowed it from him and used it for a couple
of weeks at Vineland. She was so pleased with the results that in gratitude she gave Hiro a rubber tree which he still has in his new studio on Central Park West. “A lot of people got cuttings from my rubber tree when they found out it was from Diane,” Hiro says. “I bet maybe now there are a dozen Diane Arbus rubber trees around New York.”

In July she went to Minneapolis to attend the opening of Avedon’s exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show—spectacularly designed by Marvin Israel—displayed over 260 photographs, twenty-five years’ worth of the finest examples of Avedon’s exploration of portraiture. With this exhibit Avedon hoped at last to be critically “considered” as a photographer. Unfortunately, the
New York Times
photo critic, Gene Thornton, spent most of his review writing about the several nude portraits Avedon had taken of Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky. “I had to read this review about my life’s work and it was all about one picture,” Avedon told Connie Goldman of National Public Radio. “He had a hang-up about this one picture—it’s as if all the others weren’t even there. I was devastated…really thrown back. No artist is strong enough to stand that.” (Avedon went on to be acclaimed—for the most part—for exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, the Marlborough Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum, and he would later say to hell with the critics—the artist works from the inside, not the outside, and reviews, no matter how praising, never really enrich his work.)

Diane, who had observed not only the hectic last-minute preparations for the Minneapolis show but had heard the enthusiastic response as well, was very proud of and impressed by Marvin Israel’s creative involvement—his vision had fused with Avedon’s. During the press preview she and T. Hartwell, the photograph curator, went off into a corner to discuss the visual impact of the exhibit and he brought up the possibility of the institute doing a companion show of her work. “I told her I thought Marvin could style and structure a show that could work just as dramatically for her pictures. And she agreed. She seemed very enthusiastic.”

But when she wrote to Peter Crookston, she said nothing about a possible show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Instead, she told him about the hotel she had stayed at in Minneapolis, which had “a glass dome and a swimming pool next to her room.” She sounded so pleased that Marvin had invited her—he’d been so nice. She phoned Tina Fredericks to tell her that, and Chris von Wangenheim, and a great many other people.

Diane still dreamed of getting a Pentax camera of her own. Hiro told her he could obtain one for her for the wholesale price of $1000, but she didn’t
have $1000. Impulsively, she decided to teach a master class in photography at Westbeth and charge $50 a student; if she could collect twenty students, she could buy the camera. She asked Neil Selkirk, a young English photographer who was then Hiro’s assistant, what he thought of the idea. He said he’d sign up in a second. So did one of Avedon’s assistants. This gave her the impetus she needed, and after she put an ad in the
Times,
twenty-eight more students applied. She thought she should keep the class small, but she didn’t have the heart to turn down any of the applicants, although the work of some didn’t particularly interest her.

By this time Diane had become a legend among young photographers. She had just won the Robert Levitt Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers “for outstanding achievement.” In her acceptance speech she told the audience, “I am still collecting things—the ones I recognize and the ones I can’t quite believe.” “She was already a myth,” her friend Susan Brockman said. “A lot of people related to her that way. She was a very literary character, very classical, which was unusual in this time.” Everyone who attended her course (or “the last class,” as it was later called) had seen her work at the Museum of Modern Art. “You couldn’t forget those startling pictures,” one of her students, Mark Haven, says. “There was such intense collaboration between photographer and subject.” And the “freaks” and “normals” were both captured in such an unjudgmental, uniform style—their faces took on a rich strangeness. In almost every shot a ghostly emotion seems to rise from Diane’s images. “Diane’s pictures appealed to the mind, not the eye,” Jerry Ulesmann says, “which is one of the reasons she broke new ground for photographers. Diane explored the psychological.”

As soon as her class was set and scheduled to meet in a vacant Westbeth apartment, Diane grew terrified. What could anybody learn from her? What would she say? She never stopped doubting herself, asking, “What on earth can they get from me?” At the last minute she asked Marvin Israel to sit in on the class, as well as a fashion model she was fond of, and a filmmaker she liked, Susan Brockman. Suddenly she wanted to have friends hanging around—their joint presence would be comforting to her. But once the classes got under way, she seemed to forget her fears. At first there was some resentment because she had accepted too many students. “The room was overcrowded,” Mary Ellen Andrews, a student, recalls. “We thought we wouldn’t get enough individual attention.” (Deborah Turbeville, in fact, demanded her money back, but Diane wouldn’t give it to her.) However, the resentment quickly simmered down. At the first class Diane announced, “Nobody is going to love your pictures like yourself.” “That was terrific for me,” Susan Brockman said. “It was what she wanted you [to feel] in terms of your own work. It hit me like a ton of
bricks; really opened me up.” And Anne Tucker says, “The class was not simply about photography. It was about people and relating to people and eliciting a genuine response.”