Patricia Bosworth's book about Diane Arbus is extremely well researched and hugely detailed. Sometimes I did wonder how she could have known so very much. The book is fascinating and I couldn't put it down. In fact to begin with, and I say this reluctantly as I don't wish to diminish it in any way, but I was reminded of books I'd read as a teenager by Danielle Steel (although that soon passed as the detail deepened). Of course, the fact that Diane Arbus' history is so evocative of the Great American Dream (a dream that so often turns it seems to nightmare), it fits how I would view the Great American Dream model, and if I remember correctly, a Danielle Steele novel almost perfectly (without any romantic happy endings, of course)
Arbus' immigrant grandparents came to New York and over the course of several decades made vast sums of money, starting as bookmakers and eventually ending up with a department store specialising in furs. Her own father successfully expanded the business into a series of shops in various cities, before losing much of the family money towards the end of his life through hapless overextending, gambling and an ill advised investment.
Arbus did not attend college following school, where she was viewed as a talented painter, but instead against her parents' wishes married Allan Arbus, who had originally wanted to be an actor and whom she met at 14. They both became photographers working in fashion together and had two children. Through their photography they became relatively successful but in time Diane stopped working with Allan and began trying to create something more meaningful to her and her photography outside of the fashion world. Allan and she eventually divorced but remained connected, as he moved towards acting and eventually to Hollywood with a new wife. Diane found success as a 'serious' photographer but struggled to make money, unlike her friend and fellow photographer, Richard Avedon. She also never found a way to deal with life long depressive states and likely made things worse for herself by failing to take care of herself, contacting hepatitis, and isolating herself more and more as her mental illness worsened. There is talk of whether or not she may have been schizophrenic.
At her funeral, 'at one point... Avedon whispered, "Oh, I wish I could be an artist like Diane!' And Frederick Eberstadt whispered back, 'Oh, no, you don't."' I have to say I agree with Frederick. Her life sounded like hell.
This is not one of the academic books recommended by OCA however, it has invaluably placed many of the names I've been reading about in context such as Walker Evans, Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, Doreothea Lange, Brassai, Bruce Anderson, Lee Freidlander and Robert Frank. I have also been introduced to August Sander and Marvin Isreal and given a little more information about a host of other people from that era including Alexey Brodovitch who ties in with Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, who's work I am so besotted with. The 50s and 60s in American Photography in particular seems to have been a wonderfully interesting period.
One of the things that I found so compelling in the book was the Jewish immigrant history, the rags to riches and then riches to - well, not exactly rags, but financial lack of comfort. My own father's family travelled a similar path although ended up in London. There was little money following escape from Europe and loss of family, then a great deal of money (although not on the scale of the Russeks, Arbus' relatives, I'm sure), then none what-so-ever as it was all gambled away.
"'Our upbringing was a cultural phenomenon,' a classmate of Diane's says. 'It would never have happened if our families hadn't made a great deal of money very quickly and hadn't known how to deal with it. The kind of money our families had magnified their feelings of inadequacy, of personal failure. We grew up in an emotional desert of shame - never affirmation - and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing'".
The guilt, shame and discomfort that these characters lived with is something that resonates in a way that I don't quite understand fully as I certainly didn't grow up with oodles of money, quite the opposite in fact although we as a family had quite an extravagant lifestyle, and if I'm honest, a narcissistic sense of difference and superiority, and the final part of the quote I've used above seems to describe my late father accurately.
So, Diane Arbus' history and subsequent fatal depression was extraordinarily interesting to me as I read through the book.
What's important of course, though, for me here is her work. The book has no photos which seems strange but Patricia Bosworth explains that the books is not authorised by the Arbus estate although she had enormous support from Diane Arbus' brother Howard Nemerov, 'an esteemed and distinguished poet in his own right'. Reading about the work which has to be explained rather than shown has probably made the book richer and I have found that the history, both personal and more social, has informed my appreciation of the photographs when I've gone on to look at them.
The harrowing 'alienation, and disillusionment that had surfaced in the sixties and flowed into the seventies' is deeply compelling to witness in Diane Arbus' photographs. As is widely discussed when reading about her work, the viewer is made to feel like a voyeur forced to confront what is usually hidden from us whether you're looking at one of the so called 'freaks' or more supposedly 'normal' subjects; a viewer is simultaneously repelled and compelled by their own reaction. It is very difficult work to look at but at the same time extremely rich, detailed and full.
I wonder if it will ever be possible for me to look at the photographs taken by Diane Arbus and see them without the family history, her depression and suicide, the religious and American heritage, and have any appreciation of them that is now not infused with all of that. I doubt it and perhaps that's the point. I feel somewhat reluctant to discuss her work in any great detail at this point and think I will need to study it more and with a better education behind me - other than to say it reverberates deeply and profoundly in ways that other photographer's work has not done. I wonder if that is because she was female. Or female and Jewish. Or female, Jewish and emotionally and mentally unwell.
I suspect that she, like her work is raw in the extreme, and that she somehow encapsulates and holds for the rest of us much of the deep sense of shame, wounding, horror, and repressed outrage that results from surviving what so many millions had not survived, not only during the second world war but throughout hundreds of years of pogroms, war and displacement. I'm not only talking about Jewish people but about anyone who didn't and doesn't fit the status quo. She did not survive the rawness - it was too much for any one fragile person. But her work survives and has much to tell us.
I look forward to learning more about Diane Arbus' and the images she made.
All quotations from Diane Arbus: A Biography By Patricia Bosworth, Open Road - Integrated Media, Published 1984, Kindle Edition 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment