Diane Arbus (Art Drop #13)

Today's quick hit features a woman who photographed 'the unusual, the eccentric, and the extraordinary' during her scant 48 years on the planet.

Diane Arbus. Two Ladies at the Automat (New York City), 1966 via Chicago Art Institute Open Access

In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe tells us, “Every moment is a window on all time.” The above photograph by Diane Arbus may be such an opening.

But it is also a shard from the kaleidoscopic pattern of 1966, the year Arbus fixed those Two Ladies at the Automat in the viewfinder of her Twin Lens Rolliflex and pressed the shutter-release button.

In 1966, LBJ was in the White House. The Beatles were on tour in the United States. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. And the US began bombing Hanoi.

Americans flocked to theaters that year to see Hawaii, The Bible, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They hummed tunes from Georgie Girl, Alfie, and the theme from A Man and a Woman.

They also went to automats

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find one anywhere. But those coin-operated restaurants where you could buy pre-made sandwiches and desserts were quite the thing for much of the 20th century. Think fast-food without the drive-thru or would you like fries with that?

Diane Arbus (pronounced Dee-Ann) was born in 1923, and died by her own hand in 1971 after suffering from extreme depression. What made her famous were her portraits of marginalized people. Giants, transvestites, twins, nudists, circus performers, heavily made-up women.

There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on Earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different… . That is what I love: the differentness.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them, she said.

Some viewers found her work ghoulish and off-putting

But that didn’t stop her. She pushed the boundaries of acceptable subject matter, and her work eventually influenced filmmakers and critically acclaimed photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Nan Golden, and Sally Mann.

“With a camera around her neck, she could open almost any door,” the New York Times said about her work in 2003.

But Diane Arbus was mainly a street photographer

How did she get total strangers like those two automat ladies to sit still for her while she took a photograph they might never see? The same piece in the Times gave a possible reason. “She was fearless, tenacious, and vulnerable—a combination that conquered resistance.”

Armed with that paradoxical blend, Arbus must have literally tamed those women in the automat back in 1966. Look at them. They’re like bookends with their cigarettes, tall hats, and pencil-drawn eyebrows. Similar yet dissimilar, they could be fraternal twins. Maybe they are.

But Arbus saw something about them. So she took a photograph of the kind she called “a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know,” she said.

Now ain’t that the truth?

That’s it for today’s quick hit. For more about Arbus, check out the short video below.

Thanks for reading the Jazprose Art Drop.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

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