Many Things to Many People

Diane Arbus' birthday (1923-1971). When I think of her, I think of her persona first and then her photographs of people. What a wonder -- she had the courage of any combat photographer, and the wreckless spirit of an independent warrior. Beautiful and scary. When I see twins, her images come to mind. From Arbus' perspective, identical twins are unsettling, and they appear everywhere. They pop up in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). They appear in Double Mint gum ads, or with secret language and sometimes ferocious competitiveness. Marcy Dermansky's Twins: A Novel (2005) gets at these qualities. My friend Peaches has a twin brother, and when they get together they act as strange as can be. They love and fight one another. It's perplexing.

In Patricia Bosworth's excellent biography of Arbus (2005; first edition published in 1984) she quotes her as thinking of herself in terms of triplets. "Triplets remind me of myself when I was an adolescent . . . Lined up in three images: daughter, sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each with a tiny difference." (p. 217) Arbus would have her chosen twins pose for a portrait and then take snapshots of them. In Bosworth's words, "the combination of styles seems to pinpoint the eerie visual quality twins project -- that of being both symmetrical and ambivalent. . . twins represented a paradox she longed to continue exploring and she did . . . each picture seemed to ask what is it like to live in a body that is virtually indistinguishable from your twin's? Diane suspected that the ultimate challenge was to try creating a separate identity." (p. 240)

The twins from Roselle, New Jersey represented "the crux of her vision -- the freakishness in normalcy, the normalcy in freakishness." (pp.248-249) Arbus: "Everyone suffers from the limitation of being only one person."

People who knew her well seemed to act as if Arbus was their very own twin, whether she was married or hooked up or not. One of them observed: "Come to to think of it, everyone who ever cared about Diane became very possessive of her." Another admitted: "I wanted to see her on any terms."

"Arbus was fragile as a person but strong as an artist and [Lisette] Model respected that because she, too, was a combination of delicacy and power. Model understood that many of Diane's photos had to be taken in order to relieve her mind of the faces and night worlds that were haunting it. Through some mysterious, unconscious force Diane was starting to create in her pictures a kind of art that would be both a release and a vindication of her life." (pp. 231-232)

Jim Hughes, editor of Camera Arts, in 1965: "Diane Arbus' pictures evoked powerful emotions . . . I can't think of a bigger compliment." (p. 235)

Bosworth's composite portrait is fascinating. And Diane Arbus Revelations (2003) is a superb book that deserves its own entry sometime in future.

Marvin Israel: "Diane was many things to many people." (p.205)

She had the "Helen of Troy effect," a psychic burden but also a powerful asset in gaining her access to a wide array of subjects. Like Anne Sexton, Janis Joplin, Sue Kaufman and others of that raucous era, Arbus was an extraordinary artist who burned strong for as long as she could bear. Happy birthday, Diane!