Diane Arbus [Paperback]

Bravo to Patricia Bosworth for interviewing so many people who are gone now! The following people who knew Diane or who studied her work while she was alive made comments to Bosworth shortly before *they* died: Andy Warhol, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, John Putnam (art director of Mad magazine for many years), Bernard Malamud (a friend of Diane's brother Howard Nemerov) and Irving Mansfield (immortalized in an Arbus print as an insecure, greedy man letting his sleazebag wife Jacqueline Susann sit on his bare thighs).

Ever heard of Gail Sheehy, author of the 1970s classic "Passages" that all women pursuing careers in social work and medicine used to read? She's still alive, and you can read in Ms. Bosworth's biography about her encounters with Diane before she (Gail) became famous for "Passages."

Bosworth presents eyewitness testimony about Diane's clinical depression along with medical records. But Bosworth wisely declines to speculate on why the depression persisted for so long or why Diane refused to take lithium shortly after it hit the market in 1970. (Come to think of it, Bosworth omitted that "lithium" detail from the book but divulged it in an interview she did with Popular Photography magazine for their December 1984 issue.)

I'm glad Bosworth annoyed people by presenting evidence but no insight. Here's the only insight she could have provided, and it would have annoyed readers even more. The insightful truth is that Diane was very depressed because her talent made her very lonely. Something inside her drove her constantly to approach new people even though they might have refused her offer for a photograph. Sometimes Diane herself decided after a lot of talking that the person would make a bad photograph. She told one reject (as you can read in the Bosworth book): "I'd never get you without your mask on."

But Diane, with her remarkable curiosity and empathy, just had to keep finding new people. How could she possibly have maintained a close relationship with anybody, even nice guy Allan Arbus (father of her children), when so many fascinating people lurked outside her home? Ergo, you get loneliness and depression.

That doesn't mean another photographer alive today can use genius as an excuse for clinical depression. You can't possibly have that genius because you're living in an age of the Internet when we all can "surf" the way Diane did on foot 35 years ago. What about the other legendary female photographers who were Diane's competitors during the pre-Internet era? Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cummingham, Margaret Bourke White, etc.? None of them committed suicide or did stupid things, and the careers of them all were much longer than Diane's. Even Lisette Model, to whom Diane wrote a suicide note, kept teaching photography until she was 75. So these women didn't use male chauvinism as an excuse to screw up. Neither did Diane. Diane's genius is her excuse for doing everything she did.

I'll close with two observations on Diane. The first you will find in the Bosworth book: "Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality."

And here's one that's not in the Bosworth book. It's from Richard Lamparski, a writer whose name turns up many times in newspaper databases because he specializes in "whatever happened to" books and columns about actors of the 1950s. You've never heard of Jean Peters, Richard Webb aka Captain Midnight or Anthony Steel? Neither have most people before they read Richard Lamparski. He ain't wealthy as you can imagine. He may or may not have met Diane (his name is absent from the Bosworth bio), but he evidently knew who she was when she was alive. He put the following epigraph at the beginning of his annual catalog of has-been actors in 1972:

"To Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971), who did so much to enlarge the standards of her art and the consciousness of us all."

If there is a down side to the book, it is that it is pretty well factual, with very good and close sources, but the book starts to fade when the author explores Diane's later years. Was this woman, born into a family where depression had been discovered in her mother really depressed because of a failed marriage? The author opines to the affirmative. Or was it something more? The book only gives us a glimpse of Allan's troubled reaction to her depression.

I believe a more indepth study into the soul of this woman would have shown dramatically the tragedy of her death. Set in the time period, our society was not cognizant or nor able to recognize signals in mental depression. There are many examples in the book of how Diane was attempting to overcome the demons.

All in all, I found the book interesting and well written.