Photographer Diane Arbus in sharp focus in new bio
It’s another summer of Diane Arbus. The famed photographer, who was only 48 when she took her own life in 1971, has never been out of fashion in the art world. Her influence radiates through the work of the most potent and controversial photographers to come in her wake, and she is more dominant, it seems, than ever.
With a major solo exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s new Met Breuer gallery set for July, and with numerous displays in museums across the country, Arbus’s hauntingly frontal, squarely framed portraits of society’s marginalized — dwarfs, giants, obese nudists, the housebound and the outcast — are very much in sight. Now comes Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (Ecco, 752 pp., **** out of four stars), Arthur Lubow’s big, sharply focused, disturbingly intimate biography.
Her story has been told and, no doubt, distorted quite a bit over the decades. But Lubow’s deeply researched and muted narrative — there’s no need to sensationalize with purple prose a life so strange and so shadowed — reads definitively.
Arbus devotees may know the outlines, yet Lubow breaks new ground. By the 19th page, for example, he asserts that Arbus and her brother, the renowned poet (and U.S. poet laureate) Howard Nemerov, began a sexual relationship in their adolescence that continued until the year of her death.
Lubow also brings fresh interpretive depth to Arbus’s relationship to her subjects — and “relationship” is the only word. It’s well known that she established long-term intimacy with more than a few of them, generating a level of trust that underlies the directness of their gaze into her lens. Whether capturing the domestic oddity of the 8-foot-9 “Jewish giant” Eddie Carmel, or “a look of postcoital languor” on the face of the Mexican dwarf Lauro Morales, Arbus was very much in their lives, sometimes sexually, often as a confidant.
As for Arbus’s origins, Lubow efficiently escorts the reader through a vanished world of Manhattan privilege. Arbus was born to the line of Russeks, an immigrant Jewish family that found great wealth as New York furriers, with a Fifth Avenue department store catering to the rich through the Great Depression and beyond. Lubow suggests that Arbus’s affluence — coupled with her brilliant mind and intensely observational bent — motivated her flight from comfort to the riskier world of outsiders, dark carnivals, and street strugglers.
She also fled from her marriage to Allan Arbus, who grounded her fledgling artistic career. In the 1950s, they flourished as a fashion photography team for Glamour magazine and had two daughters, but by the ‘60s, they had split, as Arbus set out on her own. The photos that soon followed would establish her legend and define her wandering lifestyle.
Lubow chronicles Arbus’s rise and fall with a novelistic intensity that plumbs the decisive moments of a driven, unsettled soul. Along the way, he explores the complex intersections of her life and art, and delivers a major work that helps us see how Arbus saw, and how she told single-frame stories that keep speaking to us.