Customer Reviews

Diane Arbus: A Biography

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If you study the following two books you likely will realize that Diane Arbus was a genius: "An Aperture Monograph" and "Diane Arbus: Magazine Work." If you've ever tried to be a good photographer, even as a total amateur, you will appreciate her genius even more.

Bravo to Patricia Bosworth for interviewing so many people who are gone now! The following people who knew Diane or who studied her work while she was alive made comments to Bosworth shortly before *they* died: Andy Warhol, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, John Putnam (art director of Mad magazine for many years), Bernard Malamud (a friend of Diane's brother Howard Nemerov) and Irving Mansfield (immortalized in an Arbus print as an insecure, greedy man letting his sleazebag wife Jacqueline Susann sit on his bare thighs).

Ever heard of Gail Sheehy, author of the 1970s classic "Passages" that all women pursuing careers in social work and medicine used to read? She's still alive, and you can read in Ms. Bosworth's biography about her encounters with Diane before she (Gail) became famous for "Passages."

Bosworth presents eyewitness testimony about Diane's clinical depression along with medical records. But Bosworth wisely declines to speculate on why the depression persisted for so long or why Diane refused to take lithium shortly after it hit the market in 1970. (Come to think of it, Bosworth omitted that "lithium" detail from the book but divulged it in an interview she did with Popular Photography magazine for their December 1984 issue.)

I'm glad Bosworth annoyed people by presenting evidence but no insight. Here's the only insight she could have provided, and it would have annoyed readers even more. The insightful truth is that Diane was very depressed because her talent made her very lonely. Something inside her drove her constantly to approach new people even though they might have refused her offer for a photograph. Sometimes Diane herself decided after a lot of talking that the person would make a bad photograph. She told one reject (as you can read in the Bosworth book): "I'd never get you without your mask on."

But Diane, with her remarkable curiosity and empathy, just had to keep finding new people. How could she possibly have maintained a close relationship with anybody, even nice guy Allan Arbus (father of her children), when so many fascinating people lurked outside her home? Ergo, you get loneliness and depression.

That doesn't mean another photographer alive today can use genius as an excuse for clinical depression. You can't possibly have that genius because you're living in an age of the Internet when we all can "surf" the way Diane did on foot 35 years ago. What about the other legendary female photographers who were Diane's competitors during the pre-Internet era? Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cummingham, Margaret Bourke White, etc.? None of them committed suicide or did stupid things, and the careers of them all were much longer than Diane's. Even Lisette Model, to whom Diane wrote a suicide note, kept teaching photography until she was 75. So these women didn't use male chauvinism as an excuse to screw up. Neither did Diane. Diane's genius is her excuse for doing everything she did.

I'll close with two observations on Diane. The first you will find in the Bosworth book: "Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality."

And here's one that's not in the Bosworth book. It's from Richard Lamparski, a writer whose name turns up many times in newspaper databases because he specializes in "whatever happened to" books and columns about actors of the 1950s. You've never heard of Jean Peters, Richard Webb aka Captain Midnight or Anthony Steel? Neither have most people before they read Richard Lamparski. He ain't wealthy as you can imagine. He may or may not have met Diane (his name is absent from the Bosworth bio), but he evidently knew who she was when she was alive. He put the following epigraph at the beginning of his annual catalog of has-been actors in 1972:

"To Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971), who did so much to enlarge the standards of her art and the consciousness of us all."

Diane Arbus was the child of immigrant parents, and grew up exploring her potential set against the backdrop of the 50's, 60's and 70's. Her husband, actor Allan Arbus was also an artist looking for his potential. Hers in photography, his in acting.

If there is a down side to the book, it is that it is pretty well factual, with very good and close sources, but the book starts to fade when the author explores Diane's later years. Was this woman, born into a family where depression had been discovered in her mother really depressed because of a failed marriage? The author opines to the affirmative. Or was it something more? The book only gives us a glimpse of Allan's troubled reaction to her depression.

I believe a more indepth study into the soul of this woman would have shown dramatically the tragedy of her death. Set in the time period, our society was not cognizant or nor able to recognize signals in mental depression. There are many examples in the book of how Diane was attempting to overcome the demons.

All in all, I found the book interesting and well written.

Patrica Bosworth's biography of Diane Arbus is an exellent book.It gives a clear and comprehensive story of Arbus's life,from her comfortable background as a daughter of a Jewish New York merchant family through her early adulthood as the wife and photographic partner of her husband Allan,through the time after her marriage when she was one of the important people on the NY cultural scene,to her disturbing "adventures" and early, tragic death at her own hand. She could not have realized how her influence would be felt so many years after her death,and this book is the only one that does justice to the life and effect of Diane Arbus. Buy it! Read it!

The author presents a well balanced accounting of the somewhat tragic life of this important, innovative photographer. Diane Arbus had significant talent, and it is amazing that she continued to produce outstanding work when burdened with a serious chronic depression. The author also impresses us with Arbus's special ability to coax almost anybody to pose for her. If she had lacked this skill, many of her portraits would never have come into being. This is a must read for those interested in the history of photography.

This is a thorough retelling and discussion of a very complex person. Bosworth does a good job of drawing on interviews with people who knew Diane Arbus, and the reader does a get a vivid sense of what the burgeoning photography community was like in the 1960s. One concern I have is that this is very mucha re-telling of a life, not really an in-depth analysis. There is a certain lack of introspection about this, and the book fades off and becomes more episodic toward the end. I can't quite decide if that is intentional--an attempt to show a life coming apart at the seams--or just some final exaustion with the subject.

I can't say I really liked this book. In the early stages of the biography I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Diane's childhood, but the author does too much fawning over Diane and repeatedly talks about how gifted she was. Yes, I think we all appreciate that fact, now let's move on and get to the core of who she was. ...Except I don't necessarily feel that this book ever truly did that. There were some interesting insights, but I constantly felt far too removed from the real Diane. Each piece of information I felt I could really sink my teeth into was buried between pages and pages of repetitive or useless (to me, anyway) information.

Throughout the book I felt Bosworth also spent too much time detailing a large number of Diane's friends and acquaintances. Family, close friends and mentors are certainly key in any biography, but the deeper I got into the book, the more I found myself skimming over chunks of text, searching for what (if much of anything) these relationships MEANT to her life rather than tedious details about a person she only met a couple of times.

I was also disappointed in the lack of reflection on Arbus's death at the end of the book. I had expected many more thoughts on that, or maybe even a bit of discussion on her legacy, and how her work is now received. Instead, the book ends with her death.

In short: If you want to know more about Arbus, read the book, but be prepared to skim.

I knew only a scant amount about Diane Arbus's life before picking up this biography at a used bookshop in Savannah, GA. While my impression of a depressed woman who was drawn to photograph the unusual and the bizarre was borne out, this well-executed biography puts her work and life in context. And what a life it was.

Born Diane Nemerov to a wealthy Jewish merchant family in New York in 1923, the young Arbus was largely outsourced to be raised by a retinue of servants. In poor-little-rich-girl fashion, Arbus felt alienated from her own parents and life in the real world. She later abhorred money and was largely inept at the business aspects of her work which she delegated to others. Over the objections of her parents, at age 18 she married Allan Arbus in 1941. She and her husband were partners in a fashion photography business until 1956 when Arbus chose to pursue her real calling: photographing the hidden, the bizarre, and the grotesque. Diane and Allan had two daughters and remained close, although they later divorced. Diane never remarried.

Arbus seemed to find disowned parts of herself in her relentless pursuit of the bizarre, roaming New York at all hours, seeking out circus freaks, prostitutes, transvestites, the retarded, and other "deviants" for photographic studies. She sought out sexual orgies and participated in them as a way to connect with her subjects. She continued to do conventional photography throughout her career for money, but she was increasingly drawn to life's underside for her subjects.

Subject to boughts of depression throughout her life, Arbus told friends near the end of her life that she felt alone and that her work no longer did anything for her. She committed suicide in 1971 at age 48.

Interview subjects throughout the book make reference to Arbus's suicide. However, the book ends with the suicide, and I wish the author could have explored the aftermath more thoroughly with some of the notables in her circle.

It is an understatement to say that Arbus changed ideas about what was permissible in photography, although just how much that is true has been blunted by today's sensational media immersion. In her time, Arbus's work shocked and disgusted many, while others admired the courage she displayed in exploring society's margins. In that regard, this book contributes to an understanding of how arts and culture evolve. Even more, though, it serves as a study of dark fate, of the inevitability of pursuing to extremes what calls from within.

...the life of this woman. In fact, this book isn't so much about photographer or the photographer's life as it is about exploration. Arbus told a teacher that she wanted to capture "evil," while her daughter thinks she meant "the forbidden." Hidden within the life is a multitude of meanings about what is evil, what is identity, the fringes of consciousness and society, and how some can incorporate what they encounter into themselves, and some can't.

I was enthralled by this book. It really delves into her as a person and where her head was at during various times of her life. Not very many photos of her work, if that's what you want this isn't the book for you. Nobody would bat an eye at her work today. She wouldn't have had to put up with the disapproval of her parents, husband, friends, neighbors, peers if she had been born years later. She was very free for a woman in those days and pretty unique.

Not only could I not put this book down, it made me miss Diane Arbus terribly once I had finished it and so sad that she must have despaired at the end. Not an easy feat for a book, so I would highly recommend it to anyone who is moved/intrigued/awed/interested by her photography.