There are at least three versions of Diane Arbus as an artist. Posthumously, she became the most celebrated artist in the history of the medium.
In 1972 MOMA put on a major exhibition of her photographs, and Aperture published 80 of these in diane arbus, a book ‘edited and designed by Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus’s daughter, and Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend’. Finally in July 1971, aged 49 and suffering from heaven knows what extremes of depression, she killed herself. A scheme to sell 50 portfolios of 10 annotated signed images in 1971 came to very little, with only three sold – and two of those to friends. Museums bought her pictures, but sparingly and for low prices. She had always been a melancholic and subject to depressions, and in 1968 caught hepatitis. Her thirty pictures in that show were the big attraction, but even so she was downcast at the idea that she was classified as a photographer of ‘freaks’ and ‘weirdos’ – ‘Diane Arbus is the wizard of odds!’ Even though recognized she was by no means established, and the ‘freaks’ epithet troubled her. She does well, or well enough to take the stage with Winogrand and Friedlander at MOMA in Szarkowski’s New Documents exhibition of 1967. In 1959 she was taken up by Marvin Israel, ‘my svengali’, according to the Bosworth biography – although the term does come to mind unbidden. She drifted into photography, which, in the 1950’s, was very much a man’s world: Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, all patrons of The Limelight café where ‘She’d never say a word – she’d just listen and then suddenly you’d look up and she’d be gone.’ Eventually she found a mentor: Lisette Model, a survivor from pre-war Europe, and even then something of a legend. She was a devoted mother, but was also attracted to the Bohemian sub-cultures of the big city – New York, which she never like to leave. She married young and had a family, which took up most of her time. She came from a privileged background and for a long time knew nothing of the world. She was, from most of the evidence, beautiful. It is surely only a question of time before the Diane Arbus story becomes an opera.
For Issue 5 of Photoworks Magazine, Ian Jeffrey reviewed the Diane Arbus Show Revelations at the Victoria & Albert museum, London.
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