Hang around me and
you'll get your picture taken
if we go somewhere fun.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
We All Are Freaks
When I think of Diane Arbus, celebrity portraits don't usually spring to mind. An exhaustive but poorly installed exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory changed that impression when many of the haunted faces, hung at various levels, looked familiar. Not that the curators made them easy to identify, although that may have been the point. Arbus turned some of her freaks into celebrities of a sort and vice versa.
"Diane Arbus: Constellation"
Two examples: who can forget these images?
Identical twins, Roselle, NJ (1967)
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park (1962)
Eyes cropped from her photos gaze out unsettlingly from a large video screen near the entrance to the exhibit. All were looking directly at Arbus's camera and now, visitors are looking back at them, more than half a century later.
I had forgotten that Arbus worked as a commercial photographer for years before the Museum of Modern Art made her famous shortly after she committed suicide. Many of these portraits must have been magazine assignments. Somehow, her camera makes them kin.
Writers
A few years after Arbus took this photo, I encountered the blind author's Labyrinths(1962) on a syllabus for a course in modernist literature taught by George Stade, one of Columbia's most charismatic professors. The short stories bewildered me so much that I didn't even bother to retain the New Directions paperback, although I still have most of my other college texts.
Arbus photographed a pre-cancerous Sontag; her hair turned white after treatment, at which time she adopted her signature skunk look by dying all but a front streak black. Her only child, a year younger than I, became an intellectual in his own right.
Writer Susan Sontag with her son David in New York City (1970)
Hands down, this was the most surprising photo in the exhibit. Somehow, Arbus makes the Valley of the Dolls author (31 million copies sold!) look like one of the swinging singles who also posed just as unselfconsciously for her.
Norman Mailer always has been one of my favorite authors (The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song: case closed) but this manspreading portrait certainly exposes his toxic masculinity.
Norman Mailer at home in Brooklyn (1963)
You've got to wonder what both the photographer and the author thought they were trying to convey here, or maybe it's just a bad portrait. Even the uniquely talented Arbus is entitled to an occasional failure.
(OK, the term is a little passé but at least I included a guy!)
Has there ever been a better name for a burlesque performer? She was born Fannie Belle Fleming, a country girl from West Virginia. Paul Newman even starred in a movie about her and she lived to see it. Fleming''s beloved dog at the time died within hours of her in 2015.
Although Hollywood's hungriest publicity queen has what some women call "just been fucked" hair, she also projects a kind of girl-next-door quality rare for Arbus's subjects.
This hunky Italian poet from the Bronx was in the right place at the right time. His silkscreening experience (wink wink) landed him a job at the Factory early on where he starred in several of Andy Warhol's underground films and collaborated on more than 500 of the artist's Screen Tests.
I'm pretty sure I never had read a novel chattier or more than transgressive than Viva's Superstar, published in 1970. Gloria, her fictional ego goes from a wanna-be nun to making porn at the Factory, a trajectory fueled by gallons of speed.
Mae West in bed with her monkey, Santa Monica (1965)
Actresses
Does this look like a woman nominated twice for an Oscar (in Death of a Salesman and Baby Doll) or someone whose pet just died? She also was a founding member of the Actors Studio. Arbus had a thing for photographing older women in their furs.
Twenty years after this photo was taken, the Film Society of Lincoln Center honored Claudette Colbert. A very gay neighbor took me to the truly glamorous gala where I brushed past the freezing sister on the left, then 71. Once one of the world's most famous people, she starred in Birth of a Nation, a landmark silent film directed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1915, a year before my mother was born! Facts like these only can be appreciated once you achieve a certain longevity of your own.
I recall my father, a World War II vet, contemptuously dismissing people like Maurice Chevalier and Tokyo Rose as collaborators. The truth about the latter, accused of broadcasting Japanese propaganda to American soldiers, is more complicated. Born Iva Toguri in Los Angeles, the Christian Girl Scout travelled to Tokyo before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor where she was stranded after the United States interned her parents, both immigrants, in a prison camp. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, under pressure from gossip columnist Walter Winchell and the American Legion, investigated her once she returned to the US, allegedly threatening witnesses if they didn't testify against her. Convicted on a single count of treason in 1949, Toguri was pardoned by President Gerald R. Ford eight years after Arbus took this photo. Somehow, the burden of history doesn't seem to weigh too heavily on this happy woman, who left the U.S. to care for a sick aunt, not to become infamous.
Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (1967)
It took only a glance to intuit these internationally renowed ballet dancers, a decade apart in age, were once lovers. For those in the know, she celebrated their relationship just as much as their talent.
Arbus did not often focus her lens on Black Americans but the exhibit includes two photos of the Godfather of Soul. His sweaty, funky essence appears to have eluded her.
James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theater, New York City (1966)
Tiptoe Through the Tulips anyone? Forty million Americans watched this peculiar musician, who played the ukulele and sang in a falsetto, marry Miss Vicki on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" a year after Arbus photographed him. He was 37, she just 17! BTW, Jimmy Fallon, the current "Tonight Show" host, averages 1.2 million viewers a night. RIP monoculture.
I like to think I went to MoMA for the very first time to see the ground-breaking Diane Arbus exhibit which opened during my sophomore year at Columbia. The Sunday New York Times, on sale weeks late at the PX in El Paso, had been my culture bible for years, so I'm pretty sure I would have been aware of the show despite the insularity of my campus life. In any case, I've been fascinated by the photographer for nearly all of my adult life, avidly reading Patricia Bosworth's 1984 biography. I won't deny that the "freakishness" of her subjects--which, in retrospect, seems a cruel characterization--formed the core of her initial appeal. But with the perspective of age, I realize it's Arbus's acute empathy that most distinguishes her work. No one can deny the humanity emanating from her stark black and white compositions.
Arbus was way ahead of the curve adding "I" to LGBTQ. "Go ahead, stare at me like everybody else does," this resigned subject seems to be saying. "At the end of my day, all I need is my dog and a cigarette."
Hermaphrodite and dog in a carnival trailer, Maryland (1970)
In the age of RuPaul's Drag Race, it's difficult to conceive how shocking these photos were when the vast majority of closet doors remained firmly shut. It's clear this guy knows he looks good and likely would say "what the fuck do you know?" to anyone who disagreed. His fierceness embodies the bravery demonstrated at Stonewall.
Somehow wanting to look like Marilyn
Transvestite with a picture of Marilyn Monroe, New York City (1967)
. . . seems a lot less pathetic than fanboying over Joan Crawford. Or maybe that's just my East Coast bias.
Joan Crawford fan, Los Angeles (1969)
Many of the women Arbus photographs wear their clothes like armor. This is among the last photos she took.
A woman passing on the street (1971)
I half-expected these women to break into "The Ladies Who Lunch." Their bored vulnerability is almost palpable, as if they know that dressing up and meeting for lunch will be the highlight of their day.
Two ladies at the automat, New York City (1966)
Here that vulnerability has curdled into resignation. She's probably "clutching a copy of Life just to keep in touch." Cue "Is That All There Is?"
Woman in a rose hat, New York City (1966)
"Diane Arbus: Constellation" at the Armory includes almost four times as many photos as the 1972 MoMA exhibit. This one hung in both. It absolutely breaks my heart although I can't exactly say why.
A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, New York City (1966)
Do these two couples realize they were photographed by one of the 20th century's most recognizable artists and that their images have been exhibited for decades? Did it make any difference at all in their lives? Are they still together? Inquiring minds want to know.
Young couple on a bench in Washington Square Park, New York City (1965)
A young man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park, New York City (1971)
I'd like to think there's hope for a better future in this clear-eyed gaze. A white woman with a fancy camera had just asked permission to take his picture and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law the same year.
A young Negro boy, Washington Square Park in New York City (1965)
But one look at this disturbing photo tells you everything you need to know about the persistence of Black poverty in the United States, even after the creation of the so-called "Great Society."
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