Diane Arbus (20 page)

Diane knew both Robert Frank and Louis Faurer casually (they’d all done fashion ads for Bonwit Teller). Once Diane had complimented Faurer on his portrait of a retarded man holding a flower. She responded to his emotional chaotic style—his images were often eccentrically cropped, faces were sometimes out of focus. This approach went totally against the Stieglitz philosophy, which valued perfect printing, classical composition, and tonal quality in a photograph. What Faurer did, and then Robert Frank, was to forget about elegance and experiment with exaggerated scale and light and shadow. This style ultimately became known as the “snapshot aesthetic,” which hooked right onto the modernist sensibility.

Diane responded to that aesthetic. To her a photograph seemed more “real” when it was composed like a snapshot. On her own she would photograph Cheech—blurred—laughing—in motion. She photographed Jane Eliot and May ice-skating at dusk in Central Park. Alex still has that Brueghelesque portrait: inky-black images skimming across a scratched white pond.

But mostly Diane and Allan continued to work in fashion. They built their elaborate sets and cautioned their models to pose serenely and the pictures were invariably stiff and clean and neat. “Once just for the hell of it Allan got his models tipsy on champagne and then things got silly and disorganized,” Alex Eliot says. “Allan hated that. He said never again.”

He and Diane had many assignments from
Glamour
and
Vogue,
although Irving Penn was the “star” photographer at Condé Nast, producing luxurious, reasoned, structured fashion studies. As for “the
Bazaar
,” as it
was snootily called, Diane and Allan had never been able to impress the wily, brilliant art director Alexey Brodovitch
*
with their portfolio.

Richard Avedon remained his favorite. Avedon dominated the magazine throughout the fifties and into the sixties with his wit and dazzling inventiveness. He covered the French collections on location in Paris, collaborating like a movie director with his models—Dovima, Sunny Harnett, Suzy Parker, and the exotic China Machado—and every image Avedon made was fraught with glamour and passion and a hectic gaiety.

Someone at Condé Nast said, “Diane and Allan were classy people whose pictures sold fashion, but you didn’t get excited by them.” In her history of fashion photography, Nancy Hall-Duncan writes, “The work of Diane and Allan Arbus was done in the studied mold of the time, having no real influence in the field.”

Whether or not Allan cared about being influential as a photographer, nobody knew; he was a self-contained man who kept such thoughts to himself. He had tried to become a serious photographer in Italy, experimenting with blurred street images. Some of his pictures were “marvelous,” according to Alex Eliot, “but Diane’s crude portraits of Roman street urchins were even better,” perhaps because she was already developing a distinctive point of view.

Friends wondered if Allan was upset about Diane being the better photographer. “It’s rough on a guy when his wife is obviously more talented,” Rick Fredericks says. “But Allan not only accepted it, he even talked about it. He was proud of her visual gift as a brother or father might be.”

By himself he would struggle to perfect his photographic technique. “Allan was technically excellent,” says an advertising executive. “The problem was, he was often unable to apply his technique to any specific idea—which is where Diane came in. She always had an idea.”

Still, he would keep on studying light—the essential matter of photography—and the differences between the quality and quantity of light and the
nature
of light, and he would photograph a white screen over and over to test emulsions. He also used a special kind of lighting with a hanging reflector that he lowered or raised, and he would bounce strobe light off a corner of the reflector to achieve a soft and romantic effect. And he would stay for hours in the darkroom using up box after box of expensive Adox paper until he came up with the perfect print. And Diane would sit silently next to him as he printed an image over and over and over.

When he finished, he would go off to his room and practice the clarinet. He spent more and more time practicing the clarinet, and he never stopped dreaming of becoming an actor. But he knew Diane was as obsessed with the peculiar power of photography as he was with the art of make-believe, so he kept urging her to take pictures on her own: at least she could be doing what she wanted, even if he couldn’t.

And she couldn’t stop anyway—she always had a camera, usually a Leica, in her hand. Even when she was carrying on a long conversation with Pati Hill, she would have her eye pressed up against the viewfinder.

She snapped pictures all the time, although she had no particular focus or goal, just a vague, inarticulate feeling within her that somehow she wanted to photograph the private, secret experiences of people and of worlds hidden from public view. But she was too shy to ask strangers to pose, so instead she took pictures of friends.

She photographed a great many children
*
: enraptured Puerto Rican kids watching a puppet show in Spanish Harlem; a tiny, seemingly deformed boy and girl laughing into her camera (this picture became a 1962
Evergreen
cover). Then there were endless candids of her daughters, Doon and Amy, and portraits of Frederick and Isabel Eberstadt’s son, Nick, “but Nick disliked Diane so intensely the hostility radiated from the photograph.” (In contrast, the Eberstadts’ daughter, Nena, loved Diane—“went ape over her,” Eberstadt says. “After Diane photographed her, she jumped up and down and tore off all her clothes and went racing around our apartment.”)

Later Eberstadt arranged for Diane to go out to his father’s estate on Long Island’s North Shore to take a portrait of the distinguished financier presiding over a luncheon. Diane kept clicking away until the elder Eberstadt ordered her to stop. “You’ll give me indigestion!” Afterward he told his son, “Anyone who insists on taking pictures of people having a meal should be put out in a barn!”

*
Smith’s affirming picture of his two little children emerging from a dark wood into the sunlight capped the exhibit.

*
The first art director to conceive that a magazine should have a distinctive design philosophy; that visuals could express a point of view as clearly as editorial content. At
Bazaar
he revolutionized the magazine with bold new layout concepts integrating photographs and text with white space which gave excitement, fluidity, and aesthetic unity to the magazine pages.

*
John Szarkowski notes: “Her most frequent subject in fact was children—perhaps because their individuality is purer—less skillfully concealed—closer to the surface.”

M
EANWHILE
D
IANE’S SISTER.
R
ENEE,
was living with her husband, Roy Sparkia, in an apartment at Park Avenue and 96th Street that they could barely afford. Roy was grinding out magazine articles and short stories while Renée struggled to achieve some recognition as a sculptor. She worked tirelessly with her clay, shaping forms of skinny ballet dancers. (Some of her work is now in collections at the Palm Beach Institute and Lord Beaverbrook’s museum in New Brunswick.)

David Nemerov was pleased by her efforts. “It was the start of me being close to Daddy,” she says. “He ended up telling me I was his favorite.”

At the time Diane showed no interest in what her sister was doing creatively. “We’d talk about my marriage but she always ignored my work,” Renée says. “I was very hurt.”

She remembers Diane as being “down in the dumps and awfully blue” during this period. Bill Ober, then a pathologist at Knickerbocker Hospital, says that Allan would visit his office periodically to talk about Diane’s recurrent depressions, which he was finding harder and harder to take. There seemed to be no solution.

These episodes, which took the form of extreme lassitude—she couldn’t seem to respond to anything—came and went throughout their marriage, but never sprang from any particular incident. On the surface Diane appeared to be leading a rich, active life, sharing not only a successful career with her husband but two bright, healthy children as well. Even so, at the core something was false and empty for her and she remained restless and depressed much of the time.

Whether or not her depressions were genetic and caused by some deficient enzyme unrelated to anything that was happening to her day to day cannot be established, since there is no scientific proof as to whether depression is genetic or physiological. As a family the Nemerovs had shared in a mutual ongoing depression for years. “Mommy, Daddy, Howard, and I were all periodically
very
depressed,” Renée says. “But Diane’s
depressions were somehow more dramatic—more extreme. And they seemed to last longer.”

Often Diane barely had enough energy to attend the Friday-night dinners, but she would force herself to, and Renée and Roy continued coming to them “out of a sense of duty more than anything else,” since there was increasing strain between the sisters. “I wanted D to acknowledge me as an artist—something she seemed unwilling to do. I was still the baby—I hadn’t accomplished as much as my brother and sister. Well, I was working very hard and making progress and I wanted D to say something!”

Recently there had been a rather ugly outburst in the garden of the Nemerovs’ Westchester summer home. The argument had started ostensibly over the “bad manners” of Roy’s two Afghan dogs
*
—Gertrude Nemerov had a dislike of all animals.

Somehow the subject veered to Renée’s sculpture, and, as Roy wrote in his journal: “I finally could stand it no longer and told Gertrude off—said the entire family had been treating Ren like a second-rate pet all her life—no wonder she felt so insecure. That Diane more than Howard was the pampered one—the one who could do no wrong.” (He adds that Diane’s remote, dazed manner intimidated her parents. They kept getting different signals from her. She could be totally unresponsive one day and gentle and loving the next. They never knew where they were with her, and this baffled them.)

“Anyhow [the journal goes on] I let Gertrude Nemerov have it. I was bold for once. I’d got so tired of Ren being the scapegoat, the butt of family jokes when she was just as talented as her brother and sister. Gertrude began to cry and allowed as to how maybe she had favored Diane over Howard and Ren but she loved Ren dearly she assured us. Diane meanwhile sat quiet as a mouse—not saying a word—not defending Ren or anything—the afternoon ended with Allan in a rage telling us he’d never feel the same towards us again. He was angry for months after—wouldn’t allow us in the studio—when we dropped by once he was cold as ice. Diane acted as if nothing had happened.”

In 1954 Renée and Roy left New York and moved to Roy’s home state, Michigan. They settled in Frankfort on Lake Michigan and adopted a child. Roy began a successful career as “a paperback writer”—he has written thirty books, among them
Vanishing Vixen
and
Creole Surgeon.
Renée began experimenting with plastic sculptures, even inventing a synthetic bronze (mixing bronze powder with polyester). The resulting substances looked and felt like bronze and eliminated the process of casting. “But it was far too toxic for many artists to use,” she admits.
Together, she and Roy collaborated on the design of plastic-topped tables embedded with shells, pebbles, and stones they collected from their daily walks on Michigan beaches. They briefly ran the RenRoy studios in Beulah, Michigan, and soon expanded to five decorative outlets across the country. Six of their tables exhibited at the International Housing Show in Chicago won an award from the American Institute of Decorators.

The more Renée did with her life, the more she realized that her rivalry with Diane was intrinsic to shaping her identity. “I would dream about Diane—dream about what she was doing—and then I’d wake up and realize I was doing a lot on my own.”

Periodically Renée would phone Diane in New York and “we’d talk a long time and try to catch up—I’d always say, ‘Please come out and visit’ and D would always say she wanted to but just didn’t have the time.” She and Allan had more assignments from
Glamour
and
Seventeen
than they could handle. They were making money, but expenses were high, so Allan didn’t hire a secretary; instead he himself kept the books and made the phone calls—and cajoled the clients—and Diane was by his side, giving advice and suggestions, shaping and styling the shots. She would still record the sessions with her Leica for her own amusement; it was the only way she could tolerate remaining inside the studio all day.

By 1956 Diane was telling Cheech she didn’t know how much longer she could stand it. She hated the artifice of fashion—the fact that the clothes didn’t belong to the models. “When clothes belong to a person, they take on a person’s character,” she said, “and they are wonderful and fit on the body a different way.”

Mostly she hated the grinding monotony of the fashion sittings, the deadly “sameness” of the days—so much so that she would “grasp at straws” to create the slightest break in their routine.

This had begun recently when she and Allan had driven “a very tall ugly dumb but hypnotic model” Diane was especially fond of to La Guardia Airport to photograph her in spring clothes. As they approached the field, the model suddenly asked in a musing way, “Wouldn’t it be terrific if a plane crashed?” Diane repeated that story to students over the years as an example of “spontaneous honesty.” Everyone is secretly fascinated by disaster and death, but few people are willing to admit it.

When Grandma Rose died, Diane had taken photographs of her lying in her coffin. She was growing increasingly attracted to “off-limit experiences,” she told Cheech; attracted and afraid. By this time Cheech had moved to a five-flight walk-up in Spanish Harlem. She had painted the walls blood red, the ceilings blue, and had filled the rooms with her potted violets, and glued photographs of her favorite artist (Jean Cocteau) and her favorite movie star (Katharine Hepburn) above her bed. Nearby, the
bathtub was filled alternately with green or blue-tinted water in case she wanted to dye material very quickly (she was now designing costumes for Off-Broadway shows). There was also a junk room in the back, in darkness save for a big TV set always playing, but with the sound off. Diane took many pictures of the wavering images on that set.