Forty-One False Starts (24 page)

Although
Revelations
never mentions Bosworth's book, it contains an obvious corrective to it in the form of a biographical account, entitled “A Chronology,” written by Doon Arbus, Diane's older daughter, and Elisabeth Sussman, one of the curators of the San Francisco show. Here, in the place of the base metal of unreliable, self-serving hearsay, we have the solid gold of letters and diary entries and compositions written by Arbus herself. These are quoted at length and accompanied by great numbers of photographs of family members and friends and Arbus herself. And guess what? Arbus comes out looking just as brooding and morbid and sexually perverse and absurd. Where Bosworth, for example, offered secondhand and sometimes thirdhand accounts of the sex orgies Arbus participated in and photographed, the “Chronology” actually shows a photograph of a naked Arbus lying across the lap of a half-dressed black man. Quotations from the letters to which Bosworth was denied access similarly corroborate the impression of waifish unwholesomeness that Bosworth's book gives. “I need to be forlorn and anonymous in order to be truly happy,” Arbus writes to a friend in 1967; and, writing from London in 1970, “Nobody seems miserable, drunk, crippled, mad, or desperate. I finally found a few vulgar things in the suburbs, but nothing sordid yet.” In her afterword, Doon Arbus writes that the “Chronology” “amounts to a kind of autobiography.” But it amounts to no such thing. Autobiography is the art of choosing what you want the world to know about you. Arbus had no more say in what would be quoted from her letters and journals than she had in what her contemporaries would blab into a tape recorder.

In a memoir of Arbus published in
Ms.
magazine in 1972, Doon recalls the wrestling matches in bed she had with her mother:

She always beat me. Every time. And when I think of it now, I have the feeling she tricked me into losing. I was always worried about being too rough with her . . . and always, I think, a little embarrassed by her enthusiasm for the contest, so that I would start to laugh, laugh too hard to concentrate, and it would end with me pinned on my back and her smiling placidly down at me.

The positions are now reversed. Doon is smiling down on Arbus. Doon has achieved a fame of her own for the draconian control she has exercised as executor of the Arbus estate. She has withheld permission to reproduce Arbus's photographs from writers who either refused to submit texts for her approval or balked at making the changes she proposed. In October 1993 the journal
October
printed a box explaining why there were no illustrations accompanying an essay on Arbus by Carol Armstrong.
October
had submitted the text to Doon and received a five-page single-spaced letter proposing changes that meddled with content and were, of course, unacceptable. Thirteen years earlier, Ingrid Sischy, editor of
Artforum
, also had chosen to forgo illustrations for an article on Arbus by Shelley Rice. “Permission would be granted only on the condition that the article be read before a permission decision could be reached.
Artforum
is not willing to accommodate compromising stipulations,” Sischy wrote in her editor's note. Doon defends her obstructionism in an afterword in
Revelations
:

[Diane Arbus] was turning into a phenomenon and that phenomenon, while posing no threat to her, began endangering the pictures. She had achieved a form of immunity but the photographs had not. The photographs needed me. Well, they needed someone. Someone to keep track of them, to safeguard them—however unsuccessfully—from an onslaught of theory and interpretation, as if translating images into words were the only way to make them visible.

It is a measure of the power Doon wields in the Arbus world that no one dared to protect her against saying something so breathtakingly silly in print. Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive. Even negative interpretations like Lieberson's and Perl's are tributes to Arbus's vitality. Doon sees danger where none exists, and misses seeing it where it does. Photographers need to be protected not against critics' words, but against photography's plenitude. If a photographer's achievement is not to be buried under an avalanche of images, his offerings to the world must be drastically pruned. As candidates for Good pictures are extracted from contact sheets, so a photographer's extraordinary work needs to be culled from his merely good work.

Revelations
is hardly the first collection to illustrate the truism that in photography, more is less. The bulky books of Cartier-Bresson's photographs that followed the small, perfect book of his photographs of the thirties and forties put out by the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 are among the more egregious examples of this kind of editorial misguidedness. But that the keeper of the Rhine gold of Arbus's photography should have so miscalculated is surprising. Doon had it right thirty years ago when she edited and designed, in collaboration with Arbus's friend Marvin Israel, the book called
Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
. The eighty images in this incomparable collection constitute the body of work by which Arbus has been known and judged. Almost every image is an example of Arbus's style at its most essential and inimitable, and the book as a whole represents photographic publishing at its most distinguished.

The order in which the eighty images appear is neither chronological nor determined by subject, but has a mysterious, brilliant logic. As one leafs through the book, one is drawn into Arbus's world in the way one is drawn into the world of a novel. That all the photographs appear on right-hand pages facing left-hand pages blank except for a title and date gives them a weight and force they would surely not have in a more economic arrangement. We read the photographs more slowly and, by so doing, more firmly grasp their artfulness. The content of Arbus's photographs is more talked about than their form, but the content would not be what it is without the form. She did not just go out and take quik pix of her freaks and transvestites and nudists. As the
Aperture
book underscores with its repetitive series of frontal portraits, she got them to pose for her, and whenever possible, she placed them against a plain background. Arbus is hardly the first photographer to have understood the aesthetic value of the plain background, but her superimposition of this formalist device on the subject matter that was the traditional domain of informal, documentary photography is her own distinctive gesture. In the view of Arbus's admirers, the “cold, dead elegance” of her pictures, far from being something to complain about, is precisely what gives them their transfixing power.

The most novel feature of the
Aperture Monograph
, and perhaps the editors' canniest move, is the absence of any prefatory critical text. Instead, there are fifteen pages of short fragments of Arbus's speech and writing—derived largely from a tape recording made by one of the students in the 1971 class, as well as from interviews and letters—from which Arbus emerges with the vividness (and some of the speech mannerisms) of a Salinger character. As rendered by the fragments, Arbus is as brilliant and likable and amusing and off-kilter as a Glass. Here she is on the people she photographs:

Actually, they tend to like me. I'm extremely likable with them. I think I'm kind of two-faced. I'm very ingratiating. It really kind of annoys me. I'm just sort of a little too nice. Everything is Ooooo. I hear myself saying, “How terrific,” and there's this woman making a face. I really mean it's terrific. I don't mean I wish I looked like that. I don't mean I wish my children looked like that. I don't mean in my private life I want to kiss you. But I mean that's amazingly, undeniably something.

And on freaks:

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot . . . There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

And on her own achievement:

I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.

This is all very disarming (what a clever rhetorical stroke that “a little embarrassing to me” is) and it hovers over the pictures. A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but a photograph and words—the right words—are an unbeatable combination. Looking at Arbus's pictures of freaks in the light of her remark about the test they've passed in life is to look at them with new eyes.

Revelations
, in contrast, causes us to look at Arbus's work with tired eyes. The book reminds me of a porch I know with a lovely view of a valley, but where no one ever sits, because it is crammed from floor to ceiling with mattresses, broken chairs, TV sets, piles of dishes, cat carriers, baby strollers, farm implements, unfinished woodworking projects, cartons of back issues of
Popular Mechanics
, black plastic bags filled with who knows what.
Revelations
, following a recent trend of gigantism among the publications that accompany museum photography shows,
*
is similarly encumbered. In addition to the 104-page “Chronology” (itself crammed with illustrations) and Doon's afterword, there is a long essay by the other curator of the San Francisco exhibition, Sandra S. Phillips, also heavily illustrated; a short essay on Arbus's darkroom technique by Neil Selkirk, who had worked with Arbus and printed her photographs after her death; eleven pages of biographical notes by Jeff L. Rosenheim, associate curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum, on people who appear in the “Chronology”; fourteen pages of footnotes; the obligatory director's letter by Neal Benezra of the San Francisco Museum; and a sponsor's statement by Charles Schwab.

But what distinguishes the book from other recent SUVs of photography publishing, and makes them inoffensive in comparison, is the way Arbus's photographs are presented. There is no one place in the book devoted to the work. Instead, someone had the horrible idea of mingling Arbus's photographs with the various texts. You look at a few pages of Arbus photographs and then bump into one of the texts. Then there are more Arbus photographs, and then another bump. This is no way to look at photographs. Nor should photographs be bled over to the opposite page, so that two inches are in effect chopped off. Some of Arbus's best-known images—the Russian dwarfs at home, the Christmas tree in a living room in Levittown, the couple in the woods at the nudist colony—are manhandled in this way. The new photographs, with a few exceptions, only subtract from our sense of Arbus's achievement. The collection feels padded. Its cluttered cover, showing a double exposure of Arbus's face superimposed on a night view of Times Square, presages the clutter within. The
Aperture Monograph
, with its serene and uncanny cover image of twins in dark corduroy dresses posed against a white background, is secure in its canonical status.

2

Arbus came from a wealthy family—her father, David Nemerov, was the owner of the Russeks department store on Fifth Avenue—but it was evidently not the kind of wealthy family that shares its wealth with the children after they grow up. Diane married Allan Arbus at the age of eighteen, and until they amicably separated and then divorced in the late sixties, the couple supported themselves and their two children by working as advertising and fashion photographers. They worked as a team—Allan did the actual photographing, and Diane fussed with the models' clothes and thought up the ideas (rather conventional ones, not at all Arbus-like) for the photographs. Arbus started taking her own photographs on the side and gradually began to get assignments from such magazines as
Esquire
and
Harper's Bazaar
.

In 1963, seeking a recommendation for a Guggenheim grant, she brought some of her photographs to John Szarkowski, head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, who was unimpressed. As Szarkowski told Doon Arbus in 1972, “I didn't really like them. I didn't think they were quite pictures somehow. But they were very forceful. You really felt somebody who was just enormously ambitious, really ambitious. Not in any cheap way. In the most serious way. Someone who was going to stand for no minor successes.” Szarkowski soon came to think better of Arbus's work, and in 1967 he included thirty of her photographs in a show at the museum called
New Documents
, featuring two other innovative photographers, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand.

But in spite of her major success as a Szarkowski annointee, and as the recipient of two Guggenheims (one in 1964 and the other in 1966), Arbus had to struggle to support herself after she and Allan closed down the commercial photography business and went their separate ways. To augment her income, she was sometimes obliged to put her artistic ambition aside and do work that simply brought in money. One such project of necessity was a private commission in December 1969 to photograph a rich and successful New York actor and theatrical producer named Konrad Matthaei and his wife, Gay, and three children, Marcella, Leslie, and Konrad, Jr., at their East Side town house during a Christmas family gathering. Arbus exposed twenty-eight rolls of film on the two-day project and received a flat fee as well as fees for the prints the family ordered from contact sheets and work prints she submitted. Nothing was known of the Matthaei shoot until the fall of 1999, when Gay and the older daughter, Marcella, came forward with dozens of prints and twenty-eight contact sheets and offered them on loan to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum for public viewing. (Gay Matthaei was a Holyoke alumna.) From this offering comes the exhibition, and an accompanying book, called
Diane Arbus: Family Albums
, originally at Mount Holyoke and now at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU.