April 13, 2020 • 50 mins
Diane Arbus, a renowned photographer who changed our view of acceptable subject matter with shocking and emotionally riveting photographs of people considered to be on the fringes of society, or as she called them freaks. Her own struggle with depression and internal feelings of being an outsider, an oddity, drove her creative passion.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio, I Love
the Evening, Sold to a Friend, The Way of It's Today,
fair Well, The Home of a Quiet Train, The Calmness
of His Jottle. Deanne Arvis was a renowned photographer who
(00:25):
changed our view of acceptable subject matter with at the
time shocking and emotionally riveting photographs of people considered to
be on the fringes of society or she called them
freaks in quite ordinary places, as well as moving photography
into the world of art, What fil Me, What makes Me?
(00:48):
Feed on? Though? Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gayl Saltz
and joining me today is Arthur lu Bau, a journalist
who has written for The New Yorker, The New York
Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He is the author of
Deanne Arby's Portrait of a Photographer. Born in March ninete
(01:11):
as Deanne Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov,
a Jewish couple and immigrants from Russia. They lived in
New York City and owned a Fifth Avenue department store
that sold furs and other women's clothing called Russex, which
was started by Gertrude's family. Their family, as a result,
was well to do. What makes to put it simply,
(01:42):
Deanne hated her background, as she viewed it all as
horrible imposition in a way on her. She thought her
mother was completely fake, that she aspired to a kind
of upper class dignity and glamour that Deanne rejected as
being fall and the fashion business itself, she once said,
(02:03):
required you to have a fake front, because if you
showed any sign of weakness, it was all over. And
of course fashion is in a way a pretense. But
the interesting thing, just as an aside, is that Dianne
remained fascinated by a knowledgeable of fashion throughout her career,
her life, and she would talk about it in a
(02:24):
way that people less knowledgeable would would find impressive. And
she herself was always fashioned forward, and she dressed very well.
So began this whole arena, let's say, of authentic versus inauthentic,
wearing a mask or covering up, which to some degree
she considered right fashion and her mother very much wearing
(02:45):
this fake mask versus being a secret, revealing, being intimate,
being real and authentic. These two poles were a theme
that started in her young childhood and really remained throughout
her entire life as very important and ultimately very important
in her artwork. Yes, and it's important to mention as
(03:08):
well that her mother was a depressive. She basically stayed
in bed a lot, right, she did well, She did
stay in bad till about noon, and then she would
make herself up and then she would go out to lunch.
But yes, what you said before is very true and
and very significant in Arbace's career. One of the things
that fascinated her was the dawning of a mask, and
in particular in a photograph, showing the gap between what
(03:32):
she called the intention and the effect, so that you
would be able to see, say in a female impersonator,
the hairline where the wig met the forehead, or you could,
in many cases, see that a person was trying to
be something that he or she was not. She felt
that her family, certainly her mother and even she was
(03:56):
being forced to be something that she was not, that
internally she wasn't really this wealthy daughter of this wealthy family,
with this mother who appeared to be playing the mommy
role but in fact was absent really because she suffered
depression recurrent depression and was therefore literally emotionally as well
(04:17):
as actually not around, you know, in her room, not
interacting with her daughter. Alternatively, the father, who seemed more
emotionally available in certain ways and that he didn't suffer
constantly from depression, was very consumed with his business. It's
always difficult, as you well know, to speculate on what
(04:39):
causes a person's psychological lax or issues or whatever were
you want to use. Danne felt throughout her life that
she was somehow not real and that this need to
find in other people a reflection that would prove her
own reality. And I think that it started in some
way in her childhood. Was her mother's periodic absences, if
(05:03):
you will, psychological absences? Was it that her father she
was his favorite and yet he wasn't there really And
she knew because she had an older brother, Howard. She
knew that her father, David Nemrov, could, if he wished,
become extremely chilly and freeze out Howard, in particular, if
(05:25):
Howard did something that he found unacceptable. I think it's
important for people to understand that, first of all, Deanne
had what I would call genetic loading and the words
she had a mother a first degree relative with recurrent
major depression I mean significant depression, and that is likely
(05:45):
to prime their offspring, if you will, to be biologically
more likely to have depression as well. But she also
suffered the trauma of having a depressed mother. And when
your primary caretaker is really emotionally unavailable for you, even
though not of her own making, it is traumatic because
it's a kind of neglect, a kind of emotional neglect.
(06:06):
And the father, as you pointed out, you know, he,
on the other hand, may have been more emotionally available
with ambition was important to him. Making money was important
to him, Appearing successful was important to him, and he
wanted his children essentially to do the same as an
extension of himself, you know, to be also highly successful.
(06:27):
She had two siblings, Howard, who was older, and Renee,
who was younger. And Howard, as the first boy, was
incredibly bright, was an excellent student. But as you said,
if he didn't do the things that the father wanted
to do, she had an example of what could happen
emotionally to you. You're right in distinguishing between the expectations
(06:48):
of the son and the daughters. David Neumar wanted Howard
to go into the family business, and Howard refused. He
did go to Harvard, so that was good, but he
was going to be a poet, which was not so good.
And he a very successful poet. Became a poet laureate. Yeah,
I mean he reached the pinnacle of his field. Yeah,
he became a very successful poet. Although he himself always
(07:09):
admitted that Deanne was by far the more creative and
original of the two, and the third sibling, Renee, was
something of a an outsider, whereas Deanne was very bonded
in all sorts of ways with Howard. She eventually distanced
herself from Renee. Let's talk about those relationships. In that bond.
There seems to be a lot of historical speak of
(07:33):
Howard and Deanne being very, very close. What do you
make of this discussion that, in fact, she had a
sexual relationship with Howard from a young age and really
up until close to her death. Deanne told people, friends
and then later her psychiatrist that she had started having
(07:55):
sex with Howard as a young teenager when their parents
were out of the apartment, and that the relationship continued
right up until her death. Deanne was extremely sexually and
maybe as a result of this, we don't really know.
She was very sexually forward as a young teenage girl.
To what extend Howard's sexual activity with her created the
(08:16):
conditions that produced that attitude, we don't know, But it
is true that Deanne required the attention of other people
to get a sense of her own actual being. So
she found it very difficult when a man with whom
she was involved moved away from her, even when she
(08:38):
had several minute once and she was married. She still
found this extremely painful and talked about the dissolution of
herself in the wake of the ends of these affairs.
So sexual play between siblings is something that is not
that unusual exactly and probably for that time, particularly when
(09:00):
parents maybe were less concerned or attentive or intervening. Certainly
parents as absent as these wouldn't be unusual, but sexual
intercourse would definitely be unusual, and certainly something that continued.
Definitely if it were, particularly when they not only become
(09:20):
adults but become involved with other people, would be very unusual.
But there was something important perhaps for Diane, and we
see this in other ways of her having the power
to seduce and keep end the keeping part in intimacy
seems to be a recurrent theme. Who she could share
her secrets or have a secret with and know their
(09:41):
secrets That was incredibly important to her. Yeah, she was
fascinated by secrets, and she emphasized how good she was
at finding out people's secrets, and she was parsimonious in
doling out her own. So yes, I think this was
a secret between Deane and Howard. Howard also, it's worth
(10:05):
noting became a terrible alcoholic, and it's also worth noting
that his wife said that Deanne was Howard's idea of
the perfect woman. Deanne met Alan Artists when she was
thirteen years old. He was five years older. The funny
thing about it was that Alan had gone to work
at Russex as a penniless but bright young man, and
(10:29):
when he and Deanne became romantically interested in each other,
Deanne's parents, Gertrude and David, were horrified. But what's funny
about it in a way is that the same thing
had happened with Gertrude and David, because David had been
a penniless man who had gone to work at Russex.
So now Deanne was in a way repeating her mother's
action and choice in choosing Alan, and it horrified her parents,
(10:54):
who really tried to break it up, but we're unsuccessful
and actually had Deanne unders to it at the time
that it was a repetition. She may not have been
as interested in Alan, but it sounds like that was
not on her radar in terms of, you know, why
she might be choosing him. The idea that she would
be her mother in some way right terrified her. Horrified
(11:17):
her was as horrified her, and so the wish to
keep unconscious that she was being like her mother would
be pretty powerful, the power to deny that to herself.
So in a way not surprising, but this relationship, even
though you know here she is at Fieldston, I'm sure
it would be anticipated by her family and by her
(11:39):
teachers that she would go to college, etcetera, etcetera. And
in fact she stays involved and really upon graduation, essentially
they get married. It shocked her classmates because she was
such a smart student that she wasn't going on to college.
They all went to college. I mean they were these
were upper middle class and many cases quite wealthy Jewish kids.
They were expected to go to college. That's true today,
(12:01):
the Fieldston would be unheard of any anyone graduating there
to not be going to college. Yeah, so it's amazed
and i'd say shocked her friends when she said, no,
she's going to become Mrs Allan Arbis. So she decides
she's going to be Mrs Allan Arbis. And of course
they don't have any money, but the father says, okay,
you Alan can take photos and sort of become the
(12:25):
fashion photographer for the store. It was because he liked
taking pictures that David Nemer very generously said that he
would help him set up the studio and he would
give him work. You know, back then there was no
art photography market, so if you wanted to be a photographer,
you needed to do fashion work or advertising work of
(12:46):
some sort or else. And Dan later did magazine work.
So at this time they were doing fashion work and
they did set up a studio. It's interrupted by Alan
going off to the war, because this is right at
the time America enters the Second World War. And then
he comes back and then they're really in business together.
Alan operated the camera and Dianne was the stylist, which
(13:10):
was a two part job really, one was coming up
with the concept of the picture, which was in a
way the creative work, and the second, which Alan later
told me was quite humiliating for her, was arranging the
skirt and doing various things to make sure that the
model looked good, sort of the work equivalent of housekeeping.
It was very much a gendered role. I would say,
(13:30):
the man operated the equipment and the women the models
were almost all women, so took care of their dresses.
It wasn't really totally driven by Alan in the sense
that ultimately he ends up being in some ways her
biggest supporter in terms of starting her artistic career. But
it was sort of the cultural division of labor and
(13:52):
the father supporting Alan being the lead on this. Yes,
and they already had a daughter. They would later have
a second daughter. Alan was a good father, but still
the mother had a primary role, and Danne played that
role really to the hilt. I mean she was she
was an extremely devoted mother she at least never expressed
any real ambivalence about. But the other role, yes, being
(14:13):
a stylist, eventually did come to appall her because remember
she had rejected her mother's and father's too devotion to
fashion and the fakeness of it. And now she was
doing that. Now this was her career. She was spending
much of her day helping to create these illusions, and
it began to drive her crazy. She's really conflicted about
(14:34):
the role, frankly, of just of being a woman. What
does it mean to be a woman? And suddenly she
talked often about the most important and sort of greatest
moments of her life being childbirth and menstruation. She talked
often of those two topics, but those were two ways
in which she could verify her physical reality, both the
(14:55):
pain of childbirth and the physical evidence of men situation,
and of course those are very female things. I've never
thought that she was taking pride in being a woman.
It was that she was taking satisfaction in these physical
manifestations or or or feelings that were intense enough that
(15:16):
they would register. As a psychoanalyst, I would say evidence
that you have to procreate to, you know, make life.
Those things resonated for her. She appreciated that power of femininity,
the other part of the trappings of I arranged the skirts,
I vacuumed the house. Those felt demeaning to her, not
(15:39):
the opposite of being powerful, but they were the two
sides of being a woman at this juncture. She is
not taking pictures. She has not involved in the photography
end of things. They together as a team, I guess
I would say, are being successful. They're getting shoots in
Vogue and Glamour, end high end fashion magazines, and there
(16:03):
is something about her eye that Alan reports in terms
of those photographs also being very sellable. Danne came up
with the concepts. So the concept is the essential part
of a fashion photograph. The mechanics of it many people
can do. I mean, Alan was proficient, but he wasn't
particularly creative. Danne was the creative one, and so he
(16:24):
recognized this from the beginning, you know, and Deanne was
taking pictures. They took a sabbatical in Europe for a
year and she took a number of pictures, and already
she had a distinctive way of looking at things. Part
of understanding the psyche of Danne Arbys is understanding the
expectations of the role of women in the nineteen fifties,
which was to be exclusively a homemaker and mother. For
(16:46):
a woman who wanted to be a career artist, it
was particularly challenging to raise a child and be true
to your creative instincts and aspirations, a conflict that many
women still struggle with. It was even more of a
struggle for Dan Arbys the nineteen fifties. She by report,
really was a good mother. I mean, she was close
to her both of her daughters. If anything, she was
(17:09):
too attentive. If anything, she didn't have enough boundaries, especially
with the older daughter. Allen told me that the counselor
at the younger daughter's camp would read Dann's letters to
Amy as the name of the younger daughter, and he'd
never read such letters. And I've read some of them,
and yeah, they're amazing letters. Lack of boundaries is a
really important theme in her life. That she went back
(17:30):
and forth in terms of creating walls and at the
same time having difficulty having any boundaries at all. She
clearly loved her husband Alan, but she had difficulty remaining faithful.
It wasn't even clear to me whether being monogamous was
something that mattered to either of them. No, it wasn't
not sexually faithful, but emotionally faithful. Yes, these were very
(17:54):
different things to them. Being emotionally faithful to one another,
which he remained even after they separated into worst he did,
but he fell in love with another woman, and that
was a very big problem for Dan. That was the betrayal,
not a sexual betrayal. That's correct. In the nineteen fifties,
having sex with other people was not too typical of
(18:14):
any marriage in this circle. It was in this artistic
New York circle. Yes, people, especially men, but women too
had had affairs while they were married. I'm not sure
that it's so different then from now. It's just maybe
people talk about it more. Yeah, there was this fake
front that we're talking about Indian. Part of her trying
(18:36):
to transgress boundaries was this urge not to be fake.
When Alan fell in love with a woman, her name
is Zora Lampert, she would become a well known actress
um She was a very talented actress, and Alan was
studying to be an actor because it was his lifelong ambition.
Yet he really wanted to be an actor, yes, not
(18:57):
a photographer. And d M was okay with it. She
could deal with Alan being in love with Zora. What
the problem became was that Zora could not accept that
Allan was involved with her and with Deanne at the
same time, and it was Zora who said that you
will have to leave Deanne if you want to remain
(19:19):
with me, And that was devastating to d N because
Alan did choose to move out so that he could
be with Zora. But Zora told me that before this
happened once at a party, to her horror. Really, Deanne
showed up with Alan because she wanted to meet Zora,
and she was as nice as could be, but she
intimidated or because getting back to fashion, she was so
(19:42):
beautifully dressed and expensively dressed in a way that Zora,
who was then a struggling actors could never have afforded.
She wanted to meet her and was very nice to her,
but clearly there was some competitive like I'm the one,
so let's not forget that. So Zora thought, yes, let's
take a quick break here, be right back. Let's talk
(20:02):
about the moment when really, um, I mean, she had
been involved certainly in the in the arranging and the
creating of these fashion photos. At what point did she
decide I really can't do this anymore. This is not creative,
this is not who I want to be. And at
what point did Alan support her in making this greety guitar.
(20:23):
There's a very dramatic moment where there were just three
people in the studio, Dean, Allen and a friend of theirs,
Robert Brown, who told me about it, and Allen also
talked about it with me um where Deane just suddenly said,
at the end of a session with a model, I
can't do this anymore. It was shocking to both of
the men in the room because I think our dissatisfaction
(20:45):
was not a secret, but this break seemed like a
real break, and she quit. They were no longer working together,
and Deanne was going out on her own with a
thirty five millimeter camera at first to photograph in the
way that New York street photographers did back then. She
went to Coney Island. She eventually went to a side
(21:07):
show on street. She went on street to photograph people
who were passing by. She became a street photographer, which
there were a number of in New York at that time.
There's one extremely moving story, at least to me, that
Allan's assistant told me of of. One day, Alan came
back to the studio and asked where Dan's prints were.
(21:29):
The assistant said, well, I haven't done them yet because
I'm still doing our work from the fashion studio, and
Alan said, you got to remember, Dan's work is the
most important work that goes on here. So he definitely
did as he had really from the beginning understand that
Danne was a very talented and creative person in a
(21:51):
way that he was not, in a way that you know, really,
in fairness, a few people are. So he did support her,
and he told me that in a way it was
their separation that allowed her to do what she did,
because he would never if if they've been living together,
permitted her to go to some of the risky places
(22:13):
that she wound up going to take her pictures. So
it's important to realize that intermittently she is having periods
of depression, of real depression, and periods not but that
her choice to motivated obviously by her artistic passion, to
go to places that were dangerous and put herself potentially
(22:35):
in harm's way, does seem really self destructive. She took
sexual risks, She took physical risks in setting up relationships
with potential people she would photograph, in having photographic sessions,
and she maintained these relationships. She got involved sexually with
(22:58):
many of her subjects. There was something thrilling obviously for her,
but also the risk, which I would argue seemed important
and maybe self destructive. Potentially may have been spurred on
by you know, whatever feelings associated with depression, you know, guilt,
self defeat in some ways, but it was exhilarating for
(23:20):
her At the same time, it was definitely exhilarating. I
myself don't view the risk taking of her work as
self destructive anymore than you would say a war photographer
was being self destructive by putting himself or herself at risk.
But it is certainly true that she derived a more
or less sexual thrill from these encounters, even if they
(23:44):
didn't involve sex. I would argue a sexual a massochistic
sexual thrill. Maybe, I mean she she once said that
going into somebody's apartment was a little bit like going
for a sexual encounter with a man and then seeing
his wife slippers in the room, And that might be massochistic,
but it also gave her a sense and I think
(24:04):
you said this earlier, of her own power, that she
was able in the same way that that seducing men
gave her a sense of her own power and her
own keep getting back to this her own reality and
also getting back to what we're saying before. It was
a repudiation of the world that her parents had aspired to,
So instead of trying to move up, she was looking
(24:27):
at what was going on down. And she told a
story to Studs Turkle, who interviewed her for a book
he was doing on the Depression, that when she went
to see the Hooverville in Central Park, the place where
homeless people were living in the height of the depression,
she found it that there was some kind of thrilling
(24:47):
fascination that she had for this world that was barred
to her, that had a kind of underworld that didn't
exist in her very cost and restricted upbringing, and she
wanted in. She photographed sideshow quote freaks, which they called
(25:08):
themselves correct outliers, circus people, nudists, transvestites, which at the
time were certainly considered to be very much outsiders. She
also photographed families, middle class families, women and children. I
just want to quote from her. Freaks was a thing
(25:29):
I photographed a lot. There's a quality of legend about freaks,
like a person in a fairy tale who stops you
and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go
through life dreading they'll have traumatic experience. Freaks were born
with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life.
They're aristocrats. For her, this is the opposite of where
(25:52):
she came from, and it's where she wanted to be,
and it's inside of her and she's taking pictures of it. Yeah,
there's so much that can be said about her interest
in sideshow freaks. For one thing, as you say they
were performers, she never photographed people who were deformed by burns.
(26:12):
She did think that they had somehow experienced something or
done something more intense than she had herself, and they'd
survived it. And this intensity of experience we keep getting
back to you because it's what she was looking for,
and this ability to feel something strongly enough like childbirth
(26:37):
that her her sense of her own self would be reaffirmed.
Let's talk about some of the photographs, because you've talked
to some of the subjects of these photographs and sometimes
they didn't even recognize themselves, or that's not how they
thought they looked. There was something that she clearly brought
out or imbued into this photograph in some unusual and
(26:59):
creative way that even the people involved didn't necessarily recognize.
But she also spent time developing some sort of relationship
or making something happen in the moment that she would
then capture that she wanted to capture, whether she evoked
that by having sex with the person or or speaking
(27:19):
with them, or evolving their relationships. She had different techniques
for accomplishing what she always wanted to do, which was
to get people to drop their mask. She wanted to
see what was lying under their public facade, so sometimes
she would just exhaust them. A shoe could go on
for hours until the person that she was photographing couldn't
(27:42):
maintain that pose anymore. You can argue that that expression
of weariness is maybe not entirely the accurate person that
she was seeing, but it did have a force that
a smiling picture didn't have. One of the Aunt's most
fam his portraits is called Child with Toy hand Grenade
(28:03):
in Central Park. In it, a young boy stands in
a strained and awkward pose with one of the suspenders
of his shorts falling off his shoulder. His face is
pulled back into a grimace, and his hands are clenched
the right one around a realistic looking toy hand grenade.
Colin would the boy with the toy grenade the man. Now,
obviously he didn't remember the actual session, but he remembered
(28:28):
what was going on in his life because his parents
had separated and he was living basically on sugar, and
so he was very he's still actually a pretty hyper person,
but he was very hyper back then. But if you
look at the contact sheet of the of the various
pictures that she took of Colin, he's clowning, but in
this one he's grimacing and looks like he's in pain.
(28:50):
And that's, of course the one that she took, and
it's a great photograph. It became a kind of an icon.
Who knows how that happened she found him is I
think the main thing that was going in the pictures.
She saw this boy in Central Park and she knew
that she wanted to photograph him because there was something
she said that reminded him of herself. Was that true
of many of her photographs, that she saw something in
(29:10):
her subjects or waited for the something that reminded her
of herself, of herself, or of somebody who was close
to hers. So sometimes there were women on the street
that would remind her of her grandmother, who she said
was rather vulgar but superb like a witch. And so
there are a number of older women, normal middle class
women that she would stop and she would photograph, and
(29:34):
they would look not normal. One of the things that
said about Urbace is that she made freaks seem like
everyday people, and everyday people look like freaks. A great
example the photo of the quote Jewish giant with his
parents who are are dwarfed by him standing in the room.
They're a family, but they are family in turmoil. They're
(29:56):
a family and conflict. You would think these would be
parents that be sympathetic and empathetic towards their son, who
you know, is living with this essentially deformity. But she's
captured something else. Yes, Now, the Jewish Giant is somebody
that she knew, Eddie Carmel, his name was. She had
known him for a long time, so this was a
(30:16):
relationship that had culminated in this photograph. But there's a
lot under the iceberg. Before you see the tip. Eddie
had um acromegaly. I mean he had a form of
giant is um that would eventually kill him. It's unclear
how tall he was, but he was let's say roughly
seven ft tall, and he worked in sideshows, which horrified
his father, who was a very proper middle class Jewish
(30:38):
Man who wanted to go back to Israel, where they
had come from. They come to take care of the
mother's relative, who then died, but they couldn't leave because
of Eddie. So the father was angered by Eddie and
by his choosing to be inside shows to try to
make a career as a freak. Basically, the mother was
caught in the middle between her son and her husband.
(31:02):
So in the picture you see the father looking angry,
the mother looking helpless, and Eddie can barely fit in
the space of this low ceiling department. I mean, all
the details in that picture are amazing, the furniture. And again,
she doesn't stage this, she just finds it and sees it.
She's looking at a family because she's really interested in families,
(31:25):
and she's seeing a dynamic in the family. And if
she's anyone, of course, she would be Eddie. Because she's
a child who's not understood by his parents. She feels
like a freak in many ways. Yes, you don't see
tremendous love between the parent and the child in this
in this photo, and yet the freak is dwarfing his parents. Right.
(31:51):
These kinds of issues, I guess I'll say something. Certainly
do smack of her family of origin that she wanted
to and when he and did dwarf her parents? Right?
But tell us what photographs did she talk about? This? Really?
This is me I'm in here? Well? The classic one
is is a picture of a Westchester family on a
(32:12):
Sunday afternoon and she she found a woman who was
a friend of a friend of hers. Danne was having
lunch with this woman. They went to a bookstore and
the friend greeted this very made up, beautiful blonde woman
who reminded Danne of her own mother in her attention
to fashion. And I've got to say, I interviewed this
(32:33):
woman many years later and she could still remember what
she was wearing when she met Deanne, so she was
very interested in fashion. The woman suggested to Deanne that
Danne might want to come out to their house in
the summer that a swimming pool, so Danne did. She
took many photographs, but the one that she kept and
printed and has become famous shows the two parents on
(32:56):
chas Long on a Long. Deanne had decided she didn't
want the swimming pool in the picture, and I think
that's telling because she didn't want this to be a
picture about American upper middle class suburban life. She wanted
it to be something more mythic, as she was saying about,
you know, other pictures, and and more a universal. In
the background, there's a little boy. You can't see quite
(33:19):
what he's doing, but he's involved in his own activity.
What he's actually doing is feeding his toy duck in
an inflatable pool, but you don't see the duck. And
I just know this because I talked to again. He's
not not a boy anymore, the man now, and Dean
said it was a family like her own family. She
also said that it was as if the parents were
(33:40):
dreaming the boy, and the boy was inventing the parents,
which I think is also something to do with the
way she saw her family. But it's positioned as an
eatable triangle also because the boy is the apex and
the two parents are side by side. The man looks angry,
he's got his face covered with his arm. The woman
(34:00):
looks bored and beautiful and the child is in his
own world, and I think that is I mean, she said,
so this was how Dan saw her own childhood when
she took that picture and when she saw it actually later,
because in fact there's a gap. She she was ill
with hepatitis when she took that picture and then she
just collapsed. But then she printed the negatives and she
(34:23):
was thrilled with that picture. Let's pause for a break here.
So she goes through sort of these phases, stages, She
goes to these areas where transvestites are as, she goes
to these circus shows. She nurtured certain relationships to get
(34:43):
certain shots. And by the way she she is being
recognized for her work. I mean even I mean, it's
not that it took her to die to be regnized.
She was definitely recognized in her lifetime. People who knew
anything about photography very much admired what she was doing.
So she's interacting with also successful photographers, not that any
of them are making a lot of money, and in fact,
(35:05):
she was really was financially struggling as they all were,
because you know, a museum would pay an enormous amount
for painting, but pay for her photograph because it wasn't
recognized in that way. So she is being recognized, but
she's still continuing to look for new subject matter and
push her envelope, as it were. At some point she
(35:29):
is taking photographs of mentally disabled people, homes for women
who were mentally disabled, and she took a number of photographs.
There then became this question in terms of her ethics,
did she get consent from people? Did she get consent
(35:51):
from people who were capable of giving consent? And you know,
did she cross a line in terms of being an
ethical artist end of her career? In her life, she
did go out to New Jersey and photograph these developmentally
disabled women. She did not get consent. First of all,
they weren't capable of giving consent, so that she would
(36:12):
have had to get it from the guardians. You couldn't
do this kind of work today. She'd never be allowed
to um wander around. So the ethics of it, you know,
I don't know. People talk about this issue sometimes in
regard to the developmentally disabled people. Sometimes the question of
whether she was somehow ridiculing or you know, making fun
(36:33):
of the people that she photographed. Now, there's no doubt
in my mind that that is not true of developmentally
disabled people. She would say often that she loved them.
And I don't looking at those pictures, see anything other
than affection and admiration, really, because what's so distinctive about
those pictures is that she sought out the women who
looked happy. She wasn't interested in photographing. You know, normally,
(36:57):
when people Richard Abbotan had done this earlier, when they
go to these places, they're looking for signs of misery
and degradation. She was, and I'm sure they were there.
That was not her intent, and it's not what she photographed.
She was looking for people who, despite suffering from these
really grievous disabilities, were happy. That was a big theme
(37:19):
for her at that stage in her life, because she
was really not happy and wondered how it was that
people could be happy. And you know, we talk about
this because it was such a pressing issue for herself.
The other pictures, the earlier ones of freaks for instance,
or or of of people that you know, so called
normals who who she makes look freakish. There is an
(37:39):
element of cruelty in these pictures, for sure, and I
think part of what makes people uncomfortable when they see
them today, is that they don't know how to feel
about them because they're not simple pictures, and her attitude
towards these peoples was not simple. On the one hand,
she identified with them. On the other hand, she did
find them ridiculous in a in a way that she
(38:01):
found aspects of her own self ridiculous. That ambivalence which
characterizes these pictures of both affection and mockery, I think
is what she was after. It is, and it's why
other people can't take pictures like this, because they don't
have that complexity. She said, a photograph is a secret
(38:21):
about a secret. The more it tells you less you know.
I mean, that is a complated statement right there, But
the mystery of it and the not knowing was just
as important to her in terms of what she was
communicating with these photos. The kind of photograph she took
particularly was first recording something shared between the photographer and
(38:44):
the subject, so in a in a way that was
a secret. But then you have the picture and the
viewer of the picture, who is him or herself looking
at this picture and sharing something with it, So it
is a due will secret. You are communing with something
on the wall or in a book, and in turn
(39:07):
that was a communion between the subject and the photographer. Meanwhile,
she continues to have these bouts of it seems ever
worsening depression. Alan has not only separated, but as you said,
emotionally left her. He's literally moved to the West Coast,
which was devastating for her to be with somebody else.
(39:28):
She becomes involved, as you mentioned earlier, with Marvin Israel,
a very highly successful really artist but one who developed
other artists, and he is incredibly supportive of her work
and and in fact formative in terms of talking with
her about her work and what she should be doing
or could be doing. She is sexually involved with him,
(39:51):
but he has married. He will not leave his wife,
and this is very difficult for her because he's essentially
not really available, even though he's in and out. Yes,
these two most important men in her life, Alan Arbis
and Marvin Israel are in a way opposite polls um.
Alan doesn't really divorce himself emotionally from Deane. In fact,
(40:16):
their closeness continues right up until her death. Marvin, whom
she was involved with for ten years, is a much
different kind of person. He's pushing her to transgress actually,
and as you say, he was married to another psychologically
fragile artist who also had periods of of not leaving
(40:37):
the house. So Marvin's first allegiance was to Margie, his wife,
And this became increasingly painful for d m because, as
you say, he was not available to her when she
felt that she needed him, and she and she became
needier and needier. And in addition, some sort of relationship
went on between her daughter Dune and Marvin Israel. Yes,
(41:02):
so again we don't know precisely how that affected Deanne.
It seems at least plausible to me that Deanne was
involved in engineering this relationship. But friends of Deanne's told
me that they felt that even if she had helped
engineer this relationship, a sexual relationship, a sexual relationship between
(41:25):
her lover and her daughter, that it proved to be
much more painful to her than she might have anticipated,
in the way that she wouldn't have anticipated the pain
that would be caused by Alan's departure to Los Angeles.
And she was a woman in her late forties, she'd
had two serious bouts with hepatitis, she was definitely looking older.
She was always somebody who looked quite young, as in
(41:47):
the power to seduce in her mind at least may
have been being diminished by these physical frailties, as evidenced
perhaps to her of Alan moving to California and Marvin
staying at the end of the day with his wife
and even being willing to get sexually involved with the
(42:10):
daughter who would be than just a younger version of Diane.
But I think it was more that she just knew
that she was not his first priority. That is what
aided her that there was another woman who took precedence
over her. Richard Avidan had a big show in Minneapolis,
and um Marvin, who was very close to Avidant, designed
(42:32):
the show. Margie didn't go with Marvin for that opening,
so he went with Dianne. So she was for once
like the wife. I mean, they could spend the night together.
They you know, they could share you know, the hotel room.
And it was after that coming back to New York
and once again being the other woman, the other woman. Yeah,
(42:55):
that launched her long and final depression. Her final depression
obviously a severe depression. It seemed almost as though she
were actually even no longer excited about taking photographs. I
mean that her work wasn't stimulating her. These relationships or
lack thereof, certainly also impacting her mood. She was aware
(43:18):
and expressed being aware that ending her life would raise
her profile, would probably raise the value of her work.
There was this vicious circle. She was depressed, she could
no longer photograph people who were looking back at her,
and she had taken strength from that reciprocal gaze. So
(43:41):
as she got more depressed, she was photographing people like
those developmentally disabled women who did look back at her,
but it was not the kind of look that you
could get sustenance from. She became interested in photographing perhaps
sleeping people. She photographed blind people. It's fascinating to me
to see that she was looking for subject that couldn't
look back at her. At this point, she did a
(44:03):
photograph of an empty movie theater, so she had done
something at the very beginning of her career when she
quit the fashion business, also photographing newspapers blowing down the street,
and now she returned to that desolation. Right around this time,
Form put her on the cover. They've never done anything
on a photographer before at all, and they put her
(44:23):
on the cover of the magazine and at the same
time the curator of the American pavilion in Venice at
the Venice Bionale, and he wanted to include Dianne in
that exhibition, which had not been done with a photographer before,
and all of this made her extremely anxious. She complained
(44:44):
about this also to her psychiatrists. You know that that
people want things from her that she can't give them.
So this death by suicide was not a gesture. This
was planned when no one would be around, when no
one would find her. She marks in her journal a
reference to her last supper and takes barbiturous slits her wrists,
(45:05):
gets in a bathtub and is not found for two days.
Marvin is the one who discovered the body, and she
knew that Marvin would discover the body because he had
a key to her apartment in Westbeth here in Greenwich Village. Um.
So last supper I've interpreted to refer to two things.
One is that she did take barbarite ruth and slash
(45:26):
her wrist. So it is a little bit like Christ saying,
this is my body and this is my blood, and
it's a it's a kind of communion of wafer and wine.
Also at the Last Supper, Jesus also said one of
those closest to him would betray him, and so I
think she did feel betrayed by Marvin in various ways,
(45:48):
but but primarily that he wasn't there for her. There
are many things contributing to Diane's depression, but I think
that that note Last Supper suggests that the thing at
the top of her mind was this sense of betrayal
by Marvin. Deanne's work was instrumental in changing how we've
(46:12):
recognized photography as an art form, something that we should
understand at a more creatively complex level than merely the
taking of a picture. Like everything, I think she was
very ambivalent about her fame. She did want recognition, that's
for sure, and she did get it after her suicide.
(46:33):
The show at the Museum of Modern Art that was
done as a memorial retrospective was incredibly well attended to.
People were lined up in the street to get in
and it was a huge phenomenon. There have been previous photographers,
for sure, you know, people like Walker Evans who had
had one man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,
and others Ansel Adams who were um revered Arbists did
(46:54):
a couple of things, I mean one that that had
not been done before. Perhaps she reached a much wider
audience because the pictures had a psychological power to them
that made them riveting. So people who weren't otherwise interested
in photography would be transfixed by these pictures and have
powerful reactions to them. Even Walker Evans and Ansel Adams,
(47:17):
they were great photographers, but but you don't have that
immediacy of feeling that you do in front of an
Arbist picture, which I argue is enhanced or in part
created by the formal ingenuity and an artistry that is
also in those pictures. They almost sucker punch you you
(47:38):
don't expect. The more time you spend with them, the
more you see in them. Other people can't take pictures
like this because they don't have that complexity. John Sarkowski
was the director of the photography department of Museum of
Modern Art. He said after d N's death, when she
suddenly became very famous, people would come in every week
with pictures that they had taken of people up against
(47:59):
the wall, thinking that they were, you know, these close
ups of people that they would be like Dan Rbs
but they were not like Dan's pictures and people couldn't
do that. It was her, so I think yes what happened.
Very soon after her death, the art market for photography
develops and people now see these photographs as being art
and being perhaps on the same level as painting and sculpture,
(48:21):
a creative genius. Well, that wraps things up for this episode.
A huge thanks to Arthur Lubao. For more on Deanne
Arbyce's life and work, check out his book Deanne Arvis
Portrait of Photographer. Also, if you're interested in more information
(48:42):
about the people we discussed in this series, you can
check out my book The Power of Different and make
sure to follow me on Twitter at Dr Gayl Salts
or at Personalogy MD What We Feels. That's why I
(49:03):
play some metald Lollo join Home. It's just because I'm
going home to have my suffer revived because I won't
be there long for. Personalogy is a production of I
(49:38):
Heart Radio. The executive producers are Dr Gayl Saltz and
Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The associate
producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(50:01):
T
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio, I Love
the Evening, Sold to a Friend, The Way of It's Today,
fair Well, The Home of a Quiet Train, The Calmness
of His Jottle. Deanne Arvis was a renowned photographer who
(00:25):
changed our view of acceptable subject matter with at the
time shocking and emotionally riveting photographs of people considered to
be on the fringes of society or she called them
freaks in quite ordinary places, as well as moving photography
into the world of art, What fil Me, What makes Me?
(00:48):
Feed on? Though? Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gayl Saltz
and joining me today is Arthur lu Bau, a journalist
who has written for The New Yorker, The New York
Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He is the author of
Deanne Arby's Portrait of a Photographer. Born in March ninete
(01:11):
as Deanne Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov,
a Jewish couple and immigrants from Russia. They lived in
New York City and owned a Fifth Avenue department store
that sold furs and other women's clothing called Russex, which
was started by Gertrude's family. Their family, as a result,
was well to do. What makes to put it simply,
(01:42):
Deanne hated her background, as she viewed it all as
horrible imposition in a way on her. She thought her
mother was completely fake, that she aspired to a kind
of upper class dignity and glamour that Deanne rejected as
being fall and the fashion business itself, she once said,
(02:03):
required you to have a fake front, because if you
showed any sign of weakness, it was all over. And
of course fashion is in a way a pretense. But
the interesting thing, just as an aside, is that Dianne
remained fascinated by a knowledgeable of fashion throughout her career,
her life, and she would talk about it in a
(02:24):
way that people less knowledgeable would would find impressive. And
she herself was always fashioned forward, and she dressed very well.
So began this whole arena, let's say, of authentic versus inauthentic,
wearing a mask or covering up, which to some degree
she considered right fashion and her mother very much wearing
(02:45):
this fake mask versus being a secret, revealing, being intimate,
being real and authentic. These two poles were a theme
that started in her young childhood and really remained throughout
her entire life as very important and ultimately very important
in her artwork. Yes, and it's important to mention as
(03:08):
well that her mother was a depressive. She basically stayed
in bed a lot, right, she did well, She did
stay in bad till about noon, and then she would
make herself up and then she would go out to lunch.
But yes, what you said before is very true and
and very significant in Arbace's career. One of the things
that fascinated her was the dawning of a mask, and
in particular in a photograph, showing the gap between what
(03:32):
she called the intention and the effect, so that you
would be able to see, say in a female impersonator,
the hairline where the wig met the forehead, or you could,
in many cases, see that a person was trying to
be something that he or she was not. She felt
that her family, certainly her mother and even she was
(03:56):
being forced to be something that she was not, that
internally she wasn't really this wealthy daughter of this wealthy family,
with this mother who appeared to be playing the mommy
role but in fact was absent really because she suffered
depression recurrent depression and was therefore literally emotionally as well
(04:17):
as actually not around, you know, in her room, not
interacting with her daughter. Alternatively, the father, who seemed more
emotionally available in certain ways and that he didn't suffer
constantly from depression, was very consumed with his business. It's
always difficult, as you well know, to speculate on what
(04:39):
causes a person's psychological lax or issues or whatever were
you want to use. Danne felt throughout her life that
she was somehow not real and that this need to
find in other people a reflection that would prove her
own reality. And I think that it started in some
way in her childhood. Was her mother's periodic absences, if
(05:03):
you will, psychological absences? Was it that her father she
was his favorite and yet he wasn't there really And
she knew because she had an older brother, Howard. She
knew that her father, David Nemrov, could, if he wished,
become extremely chilly and freeze out Howard, in particular, if
(05:25):
Howard did something that he found unacceptable. I think it's
important for people to understand that, first of all, Deanne
had what I would call genetic loading and the words
she had a mother a first degree relative with recurrent
major depression I mean significant depression, and that is likely
(05:45):
to prime their offspring, if you will, to be biologically
more likely to have depression as well. But she also
suffered the trauma of having a depressed mother. And when
your primary caretaker is really emotionally unavailable for you, even
though not of her own making, it is traumatic because
it's a kind of neglect, a kind of emotional neglect.
(06:06):
And the father, as you pointed out, you know, he,
on the other hand, may have been more emotionally available
with ambition was important to him. Making money was important
to him, Appearing successful was important to him, and he
wanted his children essentially to do the same as an
extension of himself, you know, to be also highly successful.
(06:27):
She had two siblings, Howard, who was older, and Renee,
who was younger. And Howard, as the first boy, was
incredibly bright, was an excellent student. But as you said,
if he didn't do the things that the father wanted
to do, she had an example of what could happen
emotionally to you. You're right in distinguishing between the expectations
(06:48):
of the son and the daughters. David Neumar wanted Howard
to go into the family business, and Howard refused. He
did go to Harvard, so that was good, but he
was going to be a poet, which was not so good.
And he a very successful poet. Became a poet laureate. Yeah,
I mean he reached the pinnacle of his field. Yeah,
he became a very successful poet. Although he himself always
(07:09):
admitted that Deanne was by far the more creative and
original of the two, and the third sibling, Renee, was
something of a an outsider, whereas Deanne was very bonded
in all sorts of ways with Howard. She eventually distanced
herself from Renee. Let's talk about those relationships. In that bond.
There seems to be a lot of historical speak of
(07:33):
Howard and Deanne being very, very close. What do you
make of this discussion that, in fact, she had a
sexual relationship with Howard from a young age and really
up until close to her death. Deanne told people, friends
and then later her psychiatrist that she had started having
(07:55):
sex with Howard as a young teenager when their parents
were out of the apartment, and that the relationship continued
right up until her death. Deanne was extremely sexually and
maybe as a result of this, we don't really know.
She was very sexually forward as a young teenage girl.
To what extend Howard's sexual activity with her created the
(08:16):
conditions that produced that attitude, we don't know, But it
is true that Deanne required the attention of other people
to get a sense of her own actual being. So
she found it very difficult when a man with whom
she was involved moved away from her, even when she
(08:38):
had several minute once and she was married. She still
found this extremely painful and talked about the dissolution of
herself in the wake of the ends of these affairs.
So sexual play between siblings is something that is not
that unusual exactly and probably for that time, particularly when
(09:00):
parents maybe were less concerned or attentive or intervening. Certainly
parents as absent as these wouldn't be unusual, but sexual
intercourse would definitely be unusual, and certainly something that continued.
Definitely if it were, particularly when they not only become
(09:20):
adults but become involved with other people, would be very unusual.
But there was something important perhaps for Diane, and we
see this in other ways of her having the power
to seduce and keep end the keeping part in intimacy
seems to be a recurrent theme. Who she could share
her secrets or have a secret with and know their
(09:41):
secrets That was incredibly important to her. Yeah, she was
fascinated by secrets, and she emphasized how good she was
at finding out people's secrets, and she was parsimonious in
doling out her own. So yes, I think this was
a secret between Deane and Howard. Howard also, it's worth
(10:05):
noting became a terrible alcoholic, and it's also worth noting
that his wife said that Deanne was Howard's idea of
the perfect woman. Deanne met Alan Artists when she was
thirteen years old. He was five years older. The funny
thing about it was that Alan had gone to work
at Russex as a penniless but bright young man, and
(10:29):
when he and Deanne became romantically interested in each other,
Deanne's parents, Gertrude and David, were horrified. But what's funny
about it in a way is that the same thing
had happened with Gertrude and David, because David had been
a penniless man who had gone to work at Russex.
So now Deanne was in a way repeating her mother's
action and choice in choosing Alan, and it horrified her parents,
(10:54):
who really tried to break it up, but we're unsuccessful
and actually had Deanne unders to it at the time
that it was a repetition. She may not have been
as interested in Alan, but it sounds like that was
not on her radar in terms of, you know, why
she might be choosing him. The idea that she would
be her mother in some way right terrified her. Horrified
(11:17):
her was as horrified her, and so the wish to
keep unconscious that she was being like her mother would
be pretty powerful, the power to deny that to herself.
So in a way not surprising, but this relationship, even
though you know here she is at Fieldston, I'm sure
it would be anticipated by her family and by her
(11:39):
teachers that she would go to college, etcetera, etcetera. And
in fact she stays involved and really upon graduation, essentially
they get married. It shocked her classmates because she was
such a smart student that she wasn't going on to college.
They all went to college. I mean they were these
were upper middle class and many cases quite wealthy Jewish kids.
They were expected to go to college. That's true today,
(12:01):
the Fieldston would be unheard of any anyone graduating there
to not be going to college. Yeah, so it's amazed
and i'd say shocked her friends when she said, no,
she's going to become Mrs Allan Arbis. So she decides
she's going to be Mrs Allan Arbis. And of course
they don't have any money, but the father says, okay,
you Alan can take photos and sort of become the
(12:25):
fashion photographer for the store. It was because he liked
taking pictures that David Nemer very generously said that he
would help him set up the studio and he would
give him work. You know, back then there was no
art photography market, so if you wanted to be a photographer,
you needed to do fashion work or advertising work of
(12:46):
some sort or else. And Dan later did magazine work.
So at this time they were doing fashion work and
they did set up a studio. It's interrupted by Alan
going off to the war, because this is right at
the time America enters the Second World War. And then
he comes back and then they're really in business together.
Alan operated the camera and Dianne was the stylist, which
(13:10):
was a two part job really, one was coming up
with the concept of the picture, which was in a
way the creative work, and the second, which Alan later
told me was quite humiliating for her, was arranging the
skirt and doing various things to make sure that the
model looked good, sort of the work equivalent of housekeeping.
It was very much a gendered role. I would say,
(13:30):
the man operated the equipment and the women the models
were almost all women, so took care of their dresses.
It wasn't really totally driven by Alan in the sense
that ultimately he ends up being in some ways her
biggest supporter in terms of starting her artistic career. But
it was sort of the cultural division of labor and
(13:52):
the father supporting Alan being the lead on this. Yes,
and they already had a daughter. They would later have
a second daughter. Alan was a good father, but still
the mother had a primary role, and Danne played that
role really to the hilt. I mean she was she
was an extremely devoted mother she at least never expressed
any real ambivalence about. But the other role, yes, being
(14:13):
a stylist, eventually did come to appall her because remember
she had rejected her mother's and father's too devotion to
fashion and the fakeness of it. And now she was
doing that. Now this was her career. She was spending
much of her day helping to create these illusions, and
it began to drive her crazy. She's really conflicted about
(14:34):
the role, frankly, of just of being a woman. What
does it mean to be a woman? And suddenly she
talked often about the most important and sort of greatest
moments of her life being childbirth and menstruation. She talked
often of those two topics, but those were two ways
in which she could verify her physical reality, both the
(14:55):
pain of childbirth and the physical evidence of men situation,
and of course those are very female things. I've never
thought that she was taking pride in being a woman.
It was that she was taking satisfaction in these physical
manifestations or or or feelings that were intense enough that
(15:16):
they would register. As a psychoanalyst, I would say evidence
that you have to procreate to, you know, make life.
Those things resonated for her. She appreciated that power of femininity,
the other part of the trappings of I arranged the skirts,
I vacuumed the house. Those felt demeaning to her, not
(15:39):
the opposite of being powerful, but they were the two
sides of being a woman at this juncture. She is
not taking pictures. She has not involved in the photography
end of things. They together as a team, I guess
I would say, are being successful. They're getting shoots in
Vogue and Glamour, end high end fashion magazines, and there
(16:03):
is something about her eye that Alan reports in terms
of those photographs also being very sellable. Danne came up
with the concepts. So the concept is the essential part
of a fashion photograph. The mechanics of it many people
can do. I mean, Alan was proficient, but he wasn't
particularly creative. Danne was the creative one, and so he
(16:24):
recognized this from the beginning, you know, and Deanne was
taking pictures. They took a sabbatical in Europe for a
year and she took a number of pictures, and already
she had a distinctive way of looking at things. Part
of understanding the psyche of Danne Arbys is understanding the
expectations of the role of women in the nineteen fifties,
which was to be exclusively a homemaker and mother. For
(16:46):
a woman who wanted to be a career artist, it
was particularly challenging to raise a child and be true
to your creative instincts and aspirations, a conflict that many
women still struggle with. It was even more of a
struggle for Dan Arbys the nineteen fifties. She by report,
really was a good mother. I mean, she was close
to her both of her daughters. If anything, she was
(17:09):
too attentive. If anything, she didn't have enough boundaries, especially
with the older daughter. Allen told me that the counselor
at the younger daughter's camp would read Dann's letters to
Amy as the name of the younger daughter, and he'd
never read such letters. And I've read some of them,
and yeah, they're amazing letters. Lack of boundaries is a
really important theme in her life. That she went back
(17:30):
and forth in terms of creating walls and at the
same time having difficulty having any boundaries at all. She
clearly loved her husband Alan, but she had difficulty remaining faithful.
It wasn't even clear to me whether being monogamous was
something that mattered to either of them. No, it wasn't
not sexually faithful, but emotionally faithful. Yes, these were very
(17:54):
different things to them. Being emotionally faithful to one another,
which he remained even after they separated into worst he did,
but he fell in love with another woman, and that
was a very big problem for Dan. That was the betrayal,
not a sexual betrayal. That's correct. In the nineteen fifties,
having sex with other people was not too typical of
(18:14):
any marriage in this circle. It was in this artistic
New York circle. Yes, people, especially men, but women too
had had affairs while they were married. I'm not sure
that it's so different then from now. It's just maybe
people talk about it more. Yeah, there was this fake
front that we're talking about Indian. Part of her trying
(18:36):
to transgress boundaries was this urge not to be fake.
When Alan fell in love with a woman, her name
is Zora Lampert, she would become a well known actress
um She was a very talented actress, and Alan was
studying to be an actor because it was his lifelong ambition.
Yet he really wanted to be an actor, yes, not
(18:57):
a photographer. And d M was okay with it. She
could deal with Alan being in love with Zora. What
the problem became was that Zora could not accept that
Allan was involved with her and with Deanne at the
same time, and it was Zora who said that you
will have to leave Deanne if you want to remain
(19:19):
with me, And that was devastating to d N because
Alan did choose to move out so that he could
be with Zora. But Zora told me that before this
happened once at a party, to her horror. Really, Deanne
showed up with Alan because she wanted to meet Zora,
and she was as nice as could be, but she
intimidated or because getting back to fashion, she was so
(19:42):
beautifully dressed and expensively dressed in a way that Zora,
who was then a struggling actors could never have afforded.
She wanted to meet her and was very nice to her,
but clearly there was some competitive like I'm the one,
so let's not forget that. So Zora thought, yes, let's
take a quick break here, be right back. Let's talk
(20:02):
about the moment when really, um, I mean, she had
been involved certainly in the in the arranging and the
creating of these fashion photos. At what point did she
decide I really can't do this anymore. This is not creative,
this is not who I want to be. And at
what point did Alan support her in making this greety guitar.
(20:23):
There's a very dramatic moment where there were just three
people in the studio, Dean, Allen and a friend of theirs,
Robert Brown, who told me about it, and Allen also
talked about it with me um where Deane just suddenly said,
at the end of a session with a model, I
can't do this anymore. It was shocking to both of
the men in the room because I think our dissatisfaction
(20:45):
was not a secret, but this break seemed like a
real break, and she quit. They were no longer working together,
and Deanne was going out on her own with a
thirty five millimeter camera at first to photograph in the
way that New York street photographers did back then. She
went to Coney Island. She eventually went to a side
(21:07):
show on street. She went on street to photograph people
who were passing by. She became a street photographer, which
there were a number of in New York at that time.
There's one extremely moving story, at least to me, that
Allan's assistant told me of of. One day, Alan came
back to the studio and asked where Dan's prints were.
(21:29):
The assistant said, well, I haven't done them yet because
I'm still doing our work from the fashion studio, and
Alan said, you got to remember, Dan's work is the
most important work that goes on here. So he definitely
did as he had really from the beginning understand that
Danne was a very talented and creative person in a
(21:51):
way that he was not, in a way that you know, really,
in fairness, a few people are. So he did support her,
and he told me that in a way it was
their separation that allowed her to do what she did,
because he would never if if they've been living together,
permitted her to go to some of the risky places
(22:13):
that she wound up going to take her pictures. So
it's important to realize that intermittently she is having periods
of depression, of real depression, and periods not but that
her choice to motivated obviously by her artistic passion, to
go to places that were dangerous and put herself potentially
(22:35):
in harm's way, does seem really self destructive. She took
sexual risks, She took physical risks in setting up relationships
with potential people she would photograph, in having photographic sessions,
and she maintained these relationships. She got involved sexually with
(22:58):
many of her subjects. There was something thrilling obviously for her,
but also the risk, which I would argue seemed important
and maybe self destructive. Potentially may have been spurred on
by you know, whatever feelings associated with depression, you know, guilt,
self defeat in some ways, but it was exhilarating for
(23:20):
her At the same time, it was definitely exhilarating. I
myself don't view the risk taking of her work as
self destructive anymore than you would say a war photographer
was being self destructive by putting himself or herself at risk.
But it is certainly true that she derived a more
or less sexual thrill from these encounters, even if they
(23:44):
didn't involve sex. I would argue a sexual a massochistic
sexual thrill. Maybe, I mean she she once said that
going into somebody's apartment was a little bit like going
for a sexual encounter with a man and then seeing
his wife slippers in the room, And that might be massochistic,
but it also gave her a sense and I think
(24:04):
you said this earlier, of her own power, that she
was able in the same way that that seducing men
gave her a sense of her own power and her
own keep getting back to this her own reality and
also getting back to what we're saying before. It was
a repudiation of the world that her parents had aspired to,
So instead of trying to move up, she was looking
(24:27):
at what was going on down. And she told a
story to Studs Turkle, who interviewed her for a book
he was doing on the Depression, that when she went
to see the Hooverville in Central Park, the place where
homeless people were living in the height of the depression,
she found it that there was some kind of thrilling
(24:47):
fascination that she had for this world that was barred
to her, that had a kind of underworld that didn't
exist in her very cost and restricted upbringing, and she
wanted in. She photographed sideshow quote freaks, which they called
(25:08):
themselves correct outliers, circus people, nudists, transvestites, which at the
time were certainly considered to be very much outsiders. She
also photographed families, middle class families, women and children. I
just want to quote from her. Freaks was a thing
(25:29):
I photographed a lot. There's a quality of legend about freaks,
like a person in a fairy tale who stops you
and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go
through life dreading they'll have traumatic experience. Freaks were born
with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life.
They're aristocrats. For her, this is the opposite of where
(25:52):
she came from, and it's where she wanted to be,
and it's inside of her and she's taking pictures of it. Yeah,
there's so much that can be said about her interest
in sideshow freaks. For one thing, as you say they
were performers, she never photographed people who were deformed by burns.
(26:12):
She did think that they had somehow experienced something or
done something more intense than she had herself, and they'd
survived it. And this intensity of experience we keep getting
back to you because it's what she was looking for,
and this ability to feel something strongly enough like childbirth
(26:37):
that her her sense of her own self would be reaffirmed.
Let's talk about some of the photographs, because you've talked
to some of the subjects of these photographs and sometimes
they didn't even recognize themselves, or that's not how they
thought they looked. There was something that she clearly brought
out or imbued into this photograph in some unusual and
(26:59):
creative way that even the people involved didn't necessarily recognize.
But she also spent time developing some sort of relationship
or making something happen in the moment that she would
then capture that she wanted to capture, whether she evoked
that by having sex with the person or or speaking
(27:19):
with them, or evolving their relationships. She had different techniques
for accomplishing what she always wanted to do, which was
to get people to drop their mask. She wanted to
see what was lying under their public facade, so sometimes
she would just exhaust them. A shoe could go on
for hours until the person that she was photographing couldn't
(27:42):
maintain that pose anymore. You can argue that that expression
of weariness is maybe not entirely the accurate person that
she was seeing, but it did have a force that
a smiling picture didn't have. One of the Aunt's most
fam his portraits is called Child with Toy hand Grenade
(28:03):
in Central Park. In it, a young boy stands in
a strained and awkward pose with one of the suspenders
of his shorts falling off his shoulder. His face is
pulled back into a grimace, and his hands are clenched
the right one around a realistic looking toy hand grenade.
Colin would the boy with the toy grenade the man. Now,
obviously he didn't remember the actual session, but he remembered
(28:28):
what was going on in his life because his parents
had separated and he was living basically on sugar, and
so he was very he's still actually a pretty hyper person,
but he was very hyper back then. But if you
look at the contact sheet of the of the various
pictures that she took of Colin, he's clowning, but in
this one he's grimacing and looks like he's in pain.
(28:50):
And that's, of course the one that she took, and
it's a great photograph. It became a kind of an icon.
Who knows how that happened she found him is I
think the main thing that was going in the pictures.
She saw this boy in Central Park and she knew
that she wanted to photograph him because there was something
she said that reminded him of herself. Was that true
of many of her photographs, that she saw something in
(29:10):
her subjects or waited for the something that reminded her
of herself, of herself, or of somebody who was close
to hers. So sometimes there were women on the street
that would remind her of her grandmother, who she said
was rather vulgar but superb like a witch. And so
there are a number of older women, normal middle class
women that she would stop and she would photograph, and
(29:34):
they would look not normal. One of the things that
said about Urbace is that she made freaks seem like
everyday people, and everyday people look like freaks. A great
example the photo of the quote Jewish giant with his
parents who are are dwarfed by him standing in the room.
They're a family, but they are family in turmoil. They're
(29:56):
a family and conflict. You would think these would be
parents that be sympathetic and empathetic towards their son, who
you know, is living with this essentially deformity. But she's
captured something else. Yes, Now, the Jewish Giant is somebody
that she knew, Eddie Carmel, his name was. She had
known him for a long time, so this was a
(30:16):
relationship that had culminated in this photograph. But there's a
lot under the iceberg. Before you see the tip. Eddie
had um acromegaly. I mean he had a form of
giant is um that would eventually kill him. It's unclear
how tall he was, but he was let's say roughly
seven ft tall, and he worked in sideshows, which horrified
his father, who was a very proper middle class Jewish
(30:38):
Man who wanted to go back to Israel, where they
had come from. They come to take care of the
mother's relative, who then died, but they couldn't leave because
of Eddie. So the father was angered by Eddie and
by his choosing to be inside shows to try to
make a career as a freak. Basically, the mother was
caught in the middle between her son and her husband.
(31:02):
So in the picture you see the father looking angry,
the mother looking helpless, and Eddie can barely fit in
the space of this low ceiling department. I mean, all
the details in that picture are amazing, the furniture. And again,
she doesn't stage this, she just finds it and sees it.
She's looking at a family because she's really interested in families,
(31:25):
and she's seeing a dynamic in the family. And if
she's anyone, of course, she would be Eddie. Because she's
a child who's not understood by his parents. She feels
like a freak in many ways. Yes, you don't see
tremendous love between the parent and the child in this
in this photo, and yet the freak is dwarfing his parents. Right.
(31:51):
These kinds of issues, I guess I'll say something. Certainly
do smack of her family of origin that she wanted
to and when he and did dwarf her parents? Right?
But tell us what photographs did she talk about? This? Really?
This is me I'm in here? Well? The classic one
is is a picture of a Westchester family on a
(32:12):
Sunday afternoon and she she found a woman who was
a friend of a friend of hers. Danne was having
lunch with this woman. They went to a bookstore and
the friend greeted this very made up, beautiful blonde woman
who reminded Danne of her own mother in her attention
to fashion. And I've got to say, I interviewed this
(32:33):
woman many years later and she could still remember what
she was wearing when she met Deanne, so she was
very interested in fashion. The woman suggested to Deanne that
Danne might want to come out to their house in
the summer that a swimming pool, so Danne did. She
took many photographs, but the one that she kept and
printed and has become famous shows the two parents on
(32:56):
chas Long on a Long. Deanne had decided she didn't
want the swimming pool in the picture, and I think
that's telling because she didn't want this to be a
picture about American upper middle class suburban life. She wanted
it to be something more mythic, as she was saying about,
you know, other pictures, and and more a universal. In
the background, there's a little boy. You can't see quite
(33:19):
what he's doing, but he's involved in his own activity.
What he's actually doing is feeding his toy duck in
an inflatable pool, but you don't see the duck. And
I just know this because I talked to again. He's
not not a boy anymore, the man now, and Dean
said it was a family like her own family. She
also said that it was as if the parents were
(33:40):
dreaming the boy, and the boy was inventing the parents,
which I think is also something to do with the
way she saw her family. But it's positioned as an
eatable triangle also because the boy is the apex and
the two parents are side by side. The man looks angry,
he's got his face covered with his arm. The woman
(34:00):
looks bored and beautiful and the child is in his
own world, and I think that is I mean, she said,
so this was how Dan saw her own childhood when
she took that picture and when she saw it actually later,
because in fact there's a gap. She she was ill
with hepatitis when she took that picture and then she
just collapsed. But then she printed the negatives and she
(34:23):
was thrilled with that picture. Let's pause for a break here.
So she goes through sort of these phases, stages, She
goes to these areas where transvestites are as, she goes
to these circus shows. She nurtured certain relationships to get
(34:43):
certain shots. And by the way she she is being
recognized for her work. I mean even I mean, it's
not that it took her to die to be regnized.
She was definitely recognized in her lifetime. People who knew
anything about photography very much admired what she was doing.
So she's interacting with also successful photographers, not that any
of them are making a lot of money, and in fact,
(35:05):
she was really was financially struggling as they all were,
because you know, a museum would pay an enormous amount
for painting, but pay for her photograph because it wasn't
recognized in that way. So she is being recognized, but
she's still continuing to look for new subject matter and
push her envelope, as it were. At some point she
(35:29):
is taking photographs of mentally disabled people, homes for women
who were mentally disabled, and she took a number of photographs.
There then became this question in terms of her ethics,
did she get consent from people? Did she get consent
(35:51):
from people who were capable of giving consent? And you know,
did she cross a line in terms of being an
ethical artist end of her career? In her life, she
did go out to New Jersey and photograph these developmentally
disabled women. She did not get consent. First of all,
they weren't capable of giving consent, so that she would
(36:12):
have had to get it from the guardians. You couldn't
do this kind of work today. She'd never be allowed
to um wander around. So the ethics of it, you know,
I don't know. People talk about this issue sometimes in
regard to the developmentally disabled people. Sometimes the question of
whether she was somehow ridiculing or you know, making fun
(36:33):
of the people that she photographed. Now, there's no doubt
in my mind that that is not true of developmentally
disabled people. She would say often that she loved them.
And I don't looking at those pictures, see anything other
than affection and admiration, really, because what's so distinctive about
those pictures is that she sought out the women who
looked happy. She wasn't interested in photographing. You know, normally,
(36:57):
when people Richard Abbotan had done this earlier, when they
go to these places, they're looking for signs of misery
and degradation. She was, and I'm sure they were there.
That was not her intent, and it's not what she photographed.
She was looking for people who, despite suffering from these
really grievous disabilities, were happy. That was a big theme
(37:19):
for her at that stage in her life, because she
was really not happy and wondered how it was that
people could be happy. And you know, we talk about
this because it was such a pressing issue for herself.
The other pictures, the earlier ones of freaks for instance,
or or of of people that you know, so called
normals who who she makes look freakish. There is an
(37:39):
element of cruelty in these pictures, for sure, and I
think part of what makes people uncomfortable when they see
them today, is that they don't know how to feel
about them because they're not simple pictures, and her attitude
towards these peoples was not simple. On the one hand,
she identified with them. On the other hand, she did
find them ridiculous in a in a way that she
(38:01):
found aspects of her own self ridiculous. That ambivalence which
characterizes these pictures of both affection and mockery, I think
is what she was after. It is, and it's why
other people can't take pictures like this, because they don't
have that complexity. She said, a photograph is a secret
(38:21):
about a secret. The more it tells you less you know.
I mean, that is a complated statement right there, But
the mystery of it and the not knowing was just
as important to her in terms of what she was
communicating with these photos. The kind of photograph she took
particularly was first recording something shared between the photographer and
(38:44):
the subject, so in a in a way that was
a secret. But then you have the picture and the
viewer of the picture, who is him or herself looking
at this picture and sharing something with it, So it
is a due will secret. You are communing with something
on the wall or in a book, and in turn
(39:07):
that was a communion between the subject and the photographer. Meanwhile,
she continues to have these bouts of it seems ever
worsening depression. Alan has not only separated, but as you said,
emotionally left her. He's literally moved to the West Coast,
which was devastating for her to be with somebody else.
(39:28):
She becomes involved, as you mentioned earlier, with Marvin Israel,
a very highly successful really artist but one who developed
other artists, and he is incredibly supportive of her work
and and in fact formative in terms of talking with
her about her work and what she should be doing
or could be doing. She is sexually involved with him,
(39:51):
but he has married. He will not leave his wife,
and this is very difficult for her because he's essentially
not really available, even though he's in and out. Yes,
these two most important men in her life, Alan Arbis
and Marvin Israel are in a way opposite polls um.
Alan doesn't really divorce himself emotionally from Deane. In fact,
(40:16):
their closeness continues right up until her death. Marvin, whom
she was involved with for ten years, is a much
different kind of person. He's pushing her to transgress actually,
and as you say, he was married to another psychologically
fragile artist who also had periods of of not leaving
(40:37):
the house. So Marvin's first allegiance was to Margie, his wife,
And this became increasingly painful for d m because, as
you say, he was not available to her when she
felt that she needed him, and she and she became
needier and needier. And in addition, some sort of relationship
went on between her daughter Dune and Marvin Israel. Yes,
(41:02):
so again we don't know precisely how that affected Deanne.
It seems at least plausible to me that Deanne was
involved in engineering this relationship. But friends of Deanne's told
me that they felt that even if she had helped
engineer this relationship, a sexual relationship, a sexual relationship between
(41:25):
her lover and her daughter, that it proved to be
much more painful to her than she might have anticipated,
in the way that she wouldn't have anticipated the pain
that would be caused by Alan's departure to Los Angeles.
And she was a woman in her late forties, she'd
had two serious bouts with hepatitis, she was definitely looking older.
She was always somebody who looked quite young, as in
(41:47):
the power to seduce in her mind at least may
have been being diminished by these physical frailties, as evidenced
perhaps to her of Alan moving to California and Marvin
staying at the end of the day with his wife
and even being willing to get sexually involved with the
(42:10):
daughter who would be than just a younger version of Diane.
But I think it was more that she just knew
that she was not his first priority. That is what
aided her that there was another woman who took precedence
over her. Richard Avidan had a big show in Minneapolis,
and um Marvin, who was very close to Avidant, designed
(42:32):
the show. Margie didn't go with Marvin for that opening,
so he went with Dianne. So she was for once
like the wife. I mean, they could spend the night together.
They you know, they could share you know, the hotel room.
And it was after that coming back to New York
and once again being the other woman, the other woman. Yeah,
(42:55):
that launched her long and final depression. Her final depression
obviously a severe depression. It seemed almost as though she
were actually even no longer excited about taking photographs. I
mean that her work wasn't stimulating her. These relationships or
lack thereof, certainly also impacting her mood. She was aware
(43:18):
and expressed being aware that ending her life would raise
her profile, would probably raise the value of her work.
There was this vicious circle. She was depressed, she could
no longer photograph people who were looking back at her,
and she had taken strength from that reciprocal gaze. So
(43:41):
as she got more depressed, she was photographing people like
those developmentally disabled women who did look back at her,
but it was not the kind of look that you
could get sustenance from. She became interested in photographing perhaps
sleeping people. She photographed blind people. It's fascinating to me
to see that she was looking for subject that couldn't
look back at her. At this point, she did a
(44:03):
photograph of an empty movie theater, so she had done
something at the very beginning of her career when she
quit the fashion business, also photographing newspapers blowing down the street,
and now she returned to that desolation. Right around this time,
Form put her on the cover. They've never done anything
on a photographer before at all, and they put her
(44:23):
on the cover of the magazine and at the same
time the curator of the American pavilion in Venice at
the Venice Bionale, and he wanted to include Dianne in
that exhibition, which had not been done with a photographer before,
and all of this made her extremely anxious. She complained
(44:44):
about this also to her psychiatrists. You know that that
people want things from her that she can't give them.
So this death by suicide was not a gesture. This
was planned when no one would be around, when no
one would find her. She marks in her journal a
reference to her last supper and takes barbiturous slits her wrists,
(45:05):
gets in a bathtub and is not found for two days.
Marvin is the one who discovered the body, and she
knew that Marvin would discover the body because he had
a key to her apartment in Westbeth here in Greenwich Village. Um.
So last supper I've interpreted to refer to two things.
One is that she did take barbarite ruth and slash
(45:26):
her wrist. So it is a little bit like Christ saying,
this is my body and this is my blood, and
it's a it's a kind of communion of wafer and wine.
Also at the Last Supper, Jesus also said one of
those closest to him would betray him, and so I
think she did feel betrayed by Marvin in various ways,
(45:48):
but but primarily that he wasn't there for her. There
are many things contributing to Diane's depression, but I think
that that note Last Supper suggests that the thing at
the top of her mind was this sense of betrayal
by Marvin. Deanne's work was instrumental in changing how we've
(46:12):
recognized photography as an art form, something that we should
understand at a more creatively complex level than merely the
taking of a picture. Like everything, I think she was
very ambivalent about her fame. She did want recognition, that's
for sure, and she did get it after her suicide.
(46:33):
The show at the Museum of Modern Art that was
done as a memorial retrospective was incredibly well attended to.
People were lined up in the street to get in
and it was a huge phenomenon. There have been previous photographers,
for sure, you know, people like Walker Evans who had
had one man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,
and others Ansel Adams who were um revered Arbists did
(46:54):
a couple of things, I mean one that that had
not been done before. Perhaps she reached a much wider
audience because the pictures had a psychological power to them
that made them riveting. So people who weren't otherwise interested
in photography would be transfixed by these pictures and have
powerful reactions to them. Even Walker Evans and Ansel Adams,
(47:17):
they were great photographers, but but you don't have that
immediacy of feeling that you do in front of an
Arbist picture, which I argue is enhanced or in part
created by the formal ingenuity and an artistry that is
also in those pictures. They almost sucker punch you you
(47:38):
don't expect. The more time you spend with them, the
more you see in them. Other people can't take pictures
like this because they don't have that complexity. John Sarkowski
was the director of the photography department of Museum of
Modern Art. He said after d N's death, when she
suddenly became very famous, people would come in every week
with pictures that they had taken of people up against
(47:59):
the wall, thinking that they were, you know, these close
ups of people that they would be like Dan Rbs
but they were not like Dan's pictures and people couldn't
do that. It was her, so I think yes what happened.
Very soon after her death, the art market for photography
develops and people now see these photographs as being art
and being perhaps on the same level as painting and sculpture,
(48:21):
a creative genius. Well, that wraps things up for this episode.
A huge thanks to Arthur Lubao. For more on Deanne
Arbyce's life and work, check out his book Deanne Arvis
Portrait of Photographer. Also, if you're interested in more information
(48:42):
about the people we discussed in this series, you can
check out my book The Power of Different and make
sure to follow me on Twitter at Dr Gayl Salts
or at Personalogy MD What We Feels. That's why I
(49:03):
play some metald Lollo join Home. It's just because I'm
going home to have my suffer revived because I won't
be there long for. Personalogy is a production of I
(49:38):
Heart Radio. The executive producers are Dr Gayl Saltz and
Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The associate
producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(50:01):
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
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The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.