Interview

A Conversation about Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus Untitled (Marcella Matthaei, eleven)

In the following interview, director Marianne Doezema discusses the special exhibition Diane Arbus: Family Albums with Anthony Lee, associate professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College. Lee is co-curator of the exhibition, along with John Pultz, associate professor of art history and curator of photography, Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas.

MD: This project began to take shape when Gay Humphrey Matthaei (class of 1952) brought to my attention a group of previously unknown photographs of her family by Diane Arbus. I found them fascinating. I wondered if they held sufficient interest to generate an exhibition project, so I contacted you. What was your reaction upon seeing them?

AL: I had never seen so many photographs of a single shoot by Arbus and was immediately struck by their huge importance. Arbus is one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century, and although she took tens of thousands of pictures during her career, only a couple hundred of her photographs are commonly known. Of these, only a few are actu-ally from the same shoot. So, with the Matthaei photographs, we possess in sheer number more pictures than what had been previously available. And, through the sequence of pictures from the session, we have concrete evidence of her working methods and choices. All told, we can scrutinize 322 pictures in the form of contact sheets, dozens of finished prints, and a whole range of rough "machine prints" that Arbus sometimes made for initial inspection. This kind of large study has never been possible before, and is enormously exciting.

MD: How does this body of work enhance our understanding of Diane Arbus?

AL: At the very least, art historians will be able to interpret Arbus armed with more primary material. They will be able to develop different, perhaps competing views of her work, and those views will be grounded in a larger understanding of her overall efforts. This is all to the good, especially for a photographer who, in comparison to others of her stature, has received very little scholarly attention. To my eye, these pictures suggest a photographer grappling with a style of portraiture that is caught between fashion and documentary. Arbus worked during a moment when art photography was emerging and developing out of these two traditions. To a large degree, her portraits are prime examples of just how strange this emergence was. By mixing the fashion and documentary traditions, she sometimes was able to sustain a remarkable tension in her portraits, an unsettled and unsettling but completely purposeful way of picturing people.

Diane Arbus Untitled (Konrad Matthaei Jr.)

MD: In the process of conceptualizing this show, we approached the Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, because we were aware of their strong holdings of photographs by Arbus, including work she did for Esquire. Ultimately, the two institutions agreed to collaborate on this project, with you and John Pultz, curator at the Spencer, serving as co-curators. Why did you develop a thematic framework based on families and family albums?

AL: For several reasons. First of all, late in her life, Arbus wrote that she was putting together something she called a "family album." It was not an album in the commonplace sense of that word, in that it was not meant to contain pictures of her immediate family. Rather, it was meant to be a compilation of her work, a way to conceptualize how her overall efforts as a photographer could be organized and presented. Having committed suicide in 1971, she never completed the album. But John and I latched onto this idea right away and developed the show as a glimpse of what such an album might have looked like had she brought it to fruition.

Second, we were struck by the quite explicit associations Arbus made between her album and Noah's ark, as if she were conceiving her work not only as a collection of pictures but also as a collection of people or species who would be saved from some impending catastrophe. In the 1960s, when so many groups and individuals were standing up and laying claim to public identities, and when so many were for the first time obtaining a voice in the public sphere, Arbus was trying to identify those who might emerge out of the tumult. "Family," in a metaphorical sense, was somehow at the heart of that project. There was a kind of urgency and also valediction in Arbus's efforts, and we wanted to capture that.

Third, as we looked through the photographs, including the contact sheets from portrait sessions that the Spencer holds, we were amazed to find how many were devoted to families and family members: fathers, mothers, children, partners, in all kinds of arrangements. How odd, we thought, that Arbus obsessed on families and family members when, in the 1960s, the conventional notion of the family was under assault. Arbus even photographed the famous television family of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, perhaps the exemplar of the conventional family in the 1950s, and suggested how the Nelsons and what they represented were under siege. And she photographed them with a strange sort of delight.

We soon realized that these many ideas related to families and family albums were at the core of Arbus's work, and we couldn't resist making an exploration of them the basis for the show.

MD: Why did Arbus's work receive so much attention after her suicide in 1971?

AL: One of the things I argue for in the companion book to the show is that in the mid-1960s Arbus was already receiving vivid attention, confirmed by her inclusion in the very important New Documents show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Her pictures possessed the right understanding and mixture of photographic traditions and included a very self-conscious and crafted meditation on the work of Walker Evans and August Sander, among others. That kind of photographic savvy secured her a place at MoMA, and by the late 1960s she was already being hailed as an important American photographer.

MD: So the quality of attention changed after her suicide?

AL: Yes, absolutely. No longer was she a photographer who possessed enormous skills with the camera and a sensitive understanding of the work of previous practitioners. In the public imagination she became a photographer whose strange and often grotesque images could be explained by her tragic death. The events of her life and the ideas in her work became synonymous, and in the early 1970s her pictures went on an international tour that played up that general understanding, often to sensational extreme. The art world now had its own version of Sylvia Plath.

With this show, we are trying to re-center the understanding of Arbus's work. She was far more than a photographer uncontrollably picturing the traumas of her life, as some would have us believe. She was knowing and professional and extraordinarily talented. Indeed, she had a very strong sense of how her work might be in dialogue with major changes in the ways many New Yorkers lived their daily lives.

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