Arbus's Freaky World

IF YOU MENTION the name of Diane Arbus on a street corner in Manhattan, you are likely to hear murmuring-- "Oh, the freak photographer" or, "Her photos are strange," followed by an uncertain "What do you think of her stuff?"

Diane (pronounced "Dee-ann") Arbus is legendary for her photographs of freaks, dwarfs, giants and even "ordinary" people in unflattering poses. Contained in those pictures is a statement about how grotesque all of life is, not just the subjects photographed. But with the publication of Patricia Bosworth's biography the question of why, what compelled Arbus to hunt for life it the world of freaks's for the first time explored. Unfortunately, readers fascinated with this tortured figure will have to wait until another study for a satisfactory answer.

Diene Arbus begins with the photographer's Fairy tale birth in March of 1923 into a world of wealth and fashion. Arbus's father, David Nemerov, headed. New York's extravagant Russeks department store, reputed to be the place where millionaires bought gifts to lavish on their "kept" women. Her mother, the lovely Gertrude Russeks, was the daughter of the store's founder. Forever ill at ease with the over-indulgent life style her parents provided, the young Diane would force herself to "stand on the window ledge of her parents' apartment in the San Remo, 11 stories above Central Park West ... for as long as she could, gazing out at the trees and skyscrapers in the distance until her mother pulled her back inside." Here we get the first glimpse of a suicidal strain that would run through much of Arbus' life. Years later she would say: "I wanted to see if I could do it."

As a girl, Arbus never seemed to live in the real world, as Bosworth repeatedly emphasizes. To her, "the real world was always a fantasy". While growing up, she was unaware of her Jewishness because she was surrounded by it. Later, as a fledgling photographer, she would cover the American Nazi Party in Yorkville and listen to the anti-Semitic diatribe. "She did not react; she just listened intensely--watching, watching. And she arranged to photograph the Nazis. And they were charmed by her."

To fight the sense of unreality induced by a comfortable childhood, Arbus would ride the subway for hours at at time to observe the freaks of everyday life, the albino messenger boy, a girl with a purple birthmark. She continued to fight what she thought was a sheltered life by planting herself in unpleasant situations. When her husband Allan received training as an army photographer, her inexperienced hand took up the camera. Her first subject was the bare lightbulb hanging from their ceiling. Later, when a dead whale washed onshore in New Jersey, she took a bus there to photograph the motionless white mass.

But there were occasional retreats on her progression to confronting the life of the circus side-show. For several years, Arbus inhabited the world of fashion photography, working in the shadow of her husband. Still, everywhere she went, she made an impression. Well-known artcritc Alex Eliot, grandson of President Eliot of Harvard, was infatuate by her: "no matter how well we thought we knew her, she was elusive--an enchantress." One of her closest friends remembers her as a "young woman with the most extraordinary presence about her--she seemed haunted. She had wild, startling eyes, and she was carrying a paper bag instead of a purse and he filled the space around herself with an almost palpable mood."

BOSWORTH SEES HER break with the fashion world as the turning point in Arbus' career, the moment she went form being a photographer to being an artist. Forbidden as a young girl from even looking at freaks, she now stared. She began to prowl the streets of New York-late at night, when the train stations were "deep, empty, odoriferous-'like pits of hell''' and when the freaks-came out. Soon she became a regular at Hubert's Freak Museum. Staring at the hideous figures, she felt fear run its course through her body and she was determined to conquer it.

Even on assignments for the top magazines, Arbus let her taste for the seemy show. On an assignment for Esquire, along with photos of all American scenes like the police academy and a Boy Scout meeting she included shots of brothers, morgues and seedy hotels. Later she photographed dwarfs and freaks, confronting them with the raw camera lens, trying to dig beneath their freakish appearance and get at their human core. More than anything else, she hoped to present freaks an normal people trapped in abnormal bodies.

Diane's last subject was the retarded, whom she finally gave up on because she was unable to draw responses from them. She sank into the final of a series of depressions that had plagued her throughout her childhood and fintensified during her adult life. She told some of her friends that her work was no longer rewarding. "My work," she said, "doesn't do it for me anymore." On July 27, 1971 she committed suicide.

Bosworth strives to portray Aubus as the misunderstood artist. At the first public exhibition of he works, the Museum of Modern Art show in March 1967, critics dismissed her as a freak artist. It wasn't until a year after Arbus death that the art world embraced her work. Her pieces were exhibited at the Venice Biennale, a portfolio of her work was published in Art Forum and her name "was rapidly acquiring a semi-mythic status."

While admirable for the scope of its research, especially the extensive interviews with the photographer's friends. Bosworth's biography does not go far enough in filling in the person where there now stands a myth. The author, it seems., cannot get beyond seeing Arbus as a person who liked gutsy challenges and reveal her as someone unable to face reality. Thirteen years after her death the myth of Diane Aubus has ripened. The portray presented here tries to accomodate the fantastic element, to take the mythic status as a given and larch on to descriptions that pander to it. The result is that the public must still await a sensitive treatment of the troubled yet enigmatic person behind the lens.