You could make the case that the transgressive photographer Diane Arbus sufficiently represented the zeitgeist of the times she lived in. Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus: A Biography, although being unauthorized, has become the standard book for documenting her productive but troubled life. Bosworth does not explicitly claim that Arbus was an avatar representing the values of her times but it is easy to see how this could be true and understanding the values of the 1950’s and 1960s will go a long way in helping you understand the significance of her photos.
According to Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus was a precocious child, seemingly almost tailor-made to be an artist. She was an avid reader, felt emotions strongly, and was strangely sensitive to physical sensations, feeling life in every material item she touched. She experienced the world around her at at a much deeper level than everyone around her which, darkly, sometimes led to periods of melancholia and depression. She came from a family of secular Jews with ancestral roots in Ukraine. Her father owned a chain of expensive fur coat stores with their flagship location being on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Diane Arbus grew up in a sheltered environment with her family protecting her from the negativity of the Great Depression and World War II in their New York City apartment.
In the 1950s, Diane married Allan Arbus, the first boy she fell in love with during high school. Despite their almost inseparable attachment, she simultaneously had romantic notions for Allan’s close friend Alex Eliot, who she eventually had an affair with. The husband and wife team rose to prominence in the art world as fashion photographers, working freelance for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. They churned out magazine spreads at a dizzying pace like a highly productive factory while maintaining high standards of quality. Their work was monotonous but stable and dependable; still an unease and creeping feeling of dissatisfaction was underlying their lives. If Diane Arbus could be said to exemplify the cultural attitude of the 1950s it would be in this dullness and restraint of emotions. Everything in her life was fine and that was entirely the problem.
Up to this point, Bosworth’s biography suffers from one major flaw. There is very little said about Diane Arbus herself. The author goes into a lot of detail about the people in Arbus’s life but doesn’t say enough about her. There is a lot of information about her family and friends while Arbus just fades into the background. Her absence weighs heavy on the narrative while Bosworth goes into yet another sidetrack discussion about her brother, her friends, or other members of the professional photography community of that time. The author might have been trying to camouflage Diane Arbus in the people surrounding her to make a point of how inconspicuous she could be, but if that was done intentionally, it was taken too far, so far that it interferes with the flow and meaning of the text.
During the ‘60s, Arbus’s life began to change and this is where this biography becomes more interesting. As a fashion photographer, she got used to seeing different sides of her models. Many of them were poor, suffering from depression, or having problems with drugs and alcohol. Some of them were homeless or victims of domestic violence. But when the Arbuses photographed them, they took on a whole other appearance. These displays they put on for for the camera were superficial and fake. She took interest in who these models were in reality. She decided to use her photographer’s talents to explore this other side of life. Diane Arbus began taking pictures of carnival sideshow freaks, homosexuals, eccentrics, the mentally ill, nudists and all other manner of people who existed at the margins of society. She became fascinated with the seedy street-life of 42nd Street. She photographically documented the world of outsiders in America. She didn’t just take their pictures, though. In most cases she spent hours talking to them, getting to know them, sometimes visiting them in their homes, sometimes having sex with them. By getting to know them first, she felt like she could break through to the real people they were. When most people are confronted with a camera, they act as if they want to project to the world how they want to be seen but Diane Arbus wanted to show the world how they really were. By photographing these outsiders, Arbus tried to see something of herself in them, to identify with them and to force the viewer to do the same by confronting us with their images. Her style of portraiture was aggressive, rough, sometimes even intimidating.
For Diane Arbus, this photography was a means of transgressing her own boundaries. She was breaking taboos with her art and likewise in her own life the initial feeling of liberation led more and more to extremes. She became continuously more promiscuous, attending orgies, and going as far as having casual sex with complete strangers in public places. As the 1960s progressed, becoming more and more liberated and free spirited, her life became more disorganized, her marriage ended, and her photography become more popular. But as gallery managers and art dealers hailed her as a visionary and genius, she sunk deeper into poverty and mental illness. Just as the hippie generation ended with the Manson Family murders and the deadly chaos at Altamont, Diane Arbus sank into a hopeless state of depression and committed suicide. It was as if she personally embodied, step by step, year by year, the whole process of lifestyle experimentation, social change, and the undoing of repressions that characterized the counter cultral movement of that pivotal decade. Going so far off the rails and into wildly uncharted territory, unfortunately, led to the simultaneous downfall of both Diane Arbus and the hippies’ strive for utopia at exactly the same time.
In terms of the narrative, Bosworth does a much better job of telling the story in the chapters dealing with the 1960s. Maybe that is because that decade was the most productive and most interesting period of Diane Arbus’s life, but also the author does a better job of keeping unnecessarily extraneous information from intruding. There is still some sidetracking, she provides a lot of biographical information about Weegee even though Arbus did not actually know him, but this sidetracking is less prevalent and the narrative moves along more smoothly as a result.
Diane Arbus: A Biography certainly has its flaws. The writing is sometimes choppy and Patricia Bosworth provides quotes from a wide array of people who don’t seem to be particularly important or insightful for the purposes of this book. These shortcomings are not big enough to ruin it. Patricia Bosworth did a sufficient amount of research to make it work in the end and she succeeds in putting Arbus’s life and oeuvre into context in terms of art history, photography, theory, criticism, and the socio-cultural climate. A definite picture of Diane Arbus stands firm at the end. She was a woman who moved faster than everybody else, so fast that her contemporaries could not keep up with where she was going until it was too late. She reflected and influenced the times she lived in and it is only with hindsight that people are able to see what that means.
Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 2005.
