Art of Darkness

...I just love freaks...

...The mystery is not Arbus' suicide, it is how anyone could have considered her a humanist...

...They've already passed their test in life...

...Sex was an essential part of this experiment in self-creation...

...Nonetheless, there is no disputing either her courage or her individuality in pursuing the Realist creed that all subjects are worthy of contemplation...

...The absence of Arbus photographs is particularly crippling in a volume about a visual artist, and either Bosworth or her publisher has not helped matters by excluding as well the work of other photographers who are mentioned in the text...

...ANew Yorker writer who covered much of the same territory, though with a far cooler head, once outlined sideshow hierarchy to her, distinguishing the real aristocrats, "born freaks" like dwarfs and Siamese twins, from "made freaks" like sword swallowers and escape artists...

...Neither would Marvin Israel, the man who was her major confidant in the later years, after her marriage dissolved...

...A fellow photographer who accompanied her on some of her nightly prowls said: "Shecould hypnotize people, I swear...

...Her suicide in 1971 at the age of 48 contributed to the legend, and an exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 drew record crowds ("an artistic and a human triumph," declared Hilton Kramer in the New York Times...

...Next to them, the dwarfs are winners...

...Bosworth can report what others tell her, she cannot portray, and a reader is left with a bundle of external particulars, as if one had spent an afternoon peering at Arbus from across a crowded room...

...She is identifiably a member of the same school as the 19th-century French critic who wrote: "In reality, nothing is shocking...

...and with Walter Bagehot, berating Dickens for portraying the lower classes because "the character of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art...

...Freaks were Arbus' superior beings, the spiritual leaders of an existential revolution...

...Time, however, has provided the distance that enables us to see the photographs as a private testament, the personal catalogue of an unhappy and possibly doomed woman...

...She regretted being unable to photograph Hitler, "the greatest loser of them all...

...she extended the range of what can be called acceptable subject matter...

...Museumgoers commonly marveled at Arbus' ability to gain the cooperation of her subjects, and one of the strengths of her photographs is in fact their formal, posed quality...

...The protected daughter of a New York Jewish department store magnate (and sister of poet Howard Nemerov), she spent her life escaping her background...

...She would start talking to them and they would be as fascinated with her as she was with them...

...She was bisexual...

...Though friends and relatives who were interviewed comment repeatedly on her elfin charm and charisma, she never comes to life here...

...She had relations with sailors in the backs of buses...

...I was born way up the ladder of middle-class respectability," she said, "and I've been clambering down as fast I could ever since...

...Arbus was traveling a well-trod path...

...Behind the artist there appears to have been a person out of control, obsessive and desperate...

...For all of her charm and intelligence, depression hung over her at least from the time she was a teenager, reaching its depths in the period of her greatest success...

...She married as soon as she was able, raised afamily, immersed herself in photography—she was never without a camera around her neck— and then plunged into the city's chthonic recesses...

...As a result, Diane Arbus: A Biography (Knopf, 366 pp., $ 17.95) is unavoidably thin in some places, empty in others...

...She slept with her subjects...

...Even so, the book should be better than it is...

...It was not an easy undertaking...

...These pathetic individuals, caught between the emptiness of their lives and the miscarriage of their ideals, are compound losers, failures who are failing...

...As Bosworth put it: "She drastically altered our sense of what is permissible in photography...

...in the sun, rags are as good as imperial vestments...

...It was an era when the public was prepared to believe the worst...

...If the Aperture volume is representative of her work, Arbus was most intrigued by a variety of "made freak," not those who toured with the circus but ordinary people who rendered themselves bizarre out of deep and neurotic personal need—elderly matrons in flimsy negligees looking silly rather than sexy, body builders whose macho aspirations have run amok, women disfigured by an excess of makeup, nudists with paunches and droopy breasts, ugly transves-tites, jingoistic flagwavers...

...It was said that she had redefined photography, changed our way of seeing...

...They're aristocrats...

...One reflects on them with sadness , pitying their brilliant and tormented creator no less than their aberrant subjects...

...Arbus was clearly a magnetic personality—gentle, persuasive, persistent...

...Arbus, our Hieronymus Bosch, gave us the worst, withapassionthattransformedher individual obsessions into general ones...

...Consider the projects Bosworth tells us Arbus was interested in photographing: death row, a hospital for the insane, a condemned hotel, the Manson Gang, battered people, a pet crematorium, "the great losers of the world...

...even today, one speaks of an "Arbus style...

...Patricia Bosworth, who once worked with Arbus as a fashion model, has spent five and a half years trying to dig out the answers...

...Not all her freaks won her admiration...

...and there is a suggestion of S&M...

...And in her most famous remark, she declared: "There's a quality of legend about freaks...

...Arbus was trying to sell us something, and we are right to suspect that she was hawking shoddy goods...

...Finally, one shrinks back from them, not out of a Philistine unwillingness to participate fully in life but as one would from an unpleasantly aggressive salesman...

...Hers was an extreme sensibility, and she achieved her reputation in an extreme age, the late '60s, when everyone's expectations were turning sour...

...Arbus tested our assumptions, compelled us to refine our understanding of the world around us...

...A collection of her photographs published by Aperture has since sold almost 200,000 copies, and a second collection, to accompany a new exhibit, will appear this fall...

...What is disturbing about the photographs is the absence of any relief...

...Anyone who has wanted to believe the worst about Arbus because of her offbeat subject matter will find cause in this book...

...Diane," stated a friend, "told me she wanted to have sex with as many different kinds of people as possible because she was searching for an authenticity of experience...

...How had she persuaded these grotesques and eccentrics to sit for her...

...Walking the dangerous backstreets, she tested herself constantly to overcome her shyness, her awkwardness, her fear —and to thrill in the overcoming...

...The unblinking stares that pinion a viewer are reminiscent of the whore's powerfully defiant gaze in Manet's Olympia, yet stronger because we know the people are real, not models in an artist's studio...

...Arbus is ordinarily praised for forcing us to look at things from which we would normally avert our eyes...

...In this sense, her photographs fit comfortably into a Realist tradition that, for over a century, has been pushing the consciousness of art into all of life's neglected crevices and crannies...

...In an odd way, she can be linked to the Social Realists, who concentrated exclusively on the neglected poor out of a belief in the intrinsic nobility and ultimate superiority (expressed through revolution) of the working class...

...Those who were closest to Arbus, her former husband, Allan Arbus, and her two daughters, Doon and Amy, refused to cooperate...

...Diane Arbus did not waste her life— she was much too productive, much too courageous for anyone ever to accuse her of doing that...

...But the distinction seems a false one: The photographer's life, no less than her work, is inseparable from her suicide...

...An acquaintance who ran into her on the subway remembers her bubbling: "Don't you love freaks...

...She slept with her husband's best friend...

...But certainly she sacrificed it...

...As executrix of the estate, Doon Arbus further attempted to sabotage the project by withholding permission to reproduce any of the photographs...

...By the same token, those museum goers who once spit on her pictures and the writers who judged her work in "bad taste" were familiar fools, philistines reminiscent of the magistrates in the Madame Bovary obscenity trial, who called for literature that described life as it should be, not as it is...

...Instead of attempting to broaden or deepen our awareness, she was trying to narrow it—down to pathology—and whereas most explorers of the subterranean understand that they are focusing in on one small corner of the world, for Arbus her grotesques were the world...

...What was her relationship to them...

...Generally disconcerting and often difficult simply to look at, these pictures were unlike anything that had ever been seen before, and had an enormous impact in the '60s, making Arbus one of the most celebrated, and imitated, artists of her time...

...In the final chapters, the book virtually hurtles toward the suicide...

...Bosworth has said in an interview: "What I set out to do was to write the story of her life, not the story of her suicide...

...Indeed, what sort of life was led by this seemingly peculiar woman who appeared to be obsessed with freaks and deviants...

...After attaining a degree of success as a fashion photographer in the early 1950s, she turned to photographing society's misfits and outcasts—midgets, dwarfs, giants, trans-vestites, nudists, retardates—in a strikingly blunt, confrontational manner...

...She picked up middle-aged couples and street kids...