by PRUDENCE PEIFFER
Child teasing another, N.Y.C., 1960 by Diane Arbus. This image appeared on the cover of the Evergreen Review in 1963. PHOTO/Diane Arbus/The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC/The New York Times
A biography of Diane Arbus offers a detailed portrait of an artist longing for connection
IF EVERY BIOGRAPHY PEDDLES the aura of the unknown with a promise of revelation, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer acknowledges a darker obfuscation from the start. As his book’s fitting epigraph, Arthur Lubow chooses the artist’s cryptic challenge to anyone attempting to uncover the meaning behind her work: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Arbus wrings out the cliché that a photograph doesn’t lie and rehangs it as a riddle. What is the relationship between a secret and knowledge? How well can we understand someone, even with access to her confidences? And does this information help us see her art better, too? Or, in a Derridean twist, does knowing a secret reveal the very impossibility of its existence in the first place?
Lubow confronts an extreme instance of this problem within the first twenty pages of his seven-hundred-plus tome. He reveals, without fanfare, the ultimate secret of Arbus’s life: According to her psychiatrist, Arbus had a sexual relationship with her older brother, the onetime US poet laureate Howard Nemerov, beginning in childhood, and she last slept with him just a few weeks before her suicide. I was shocked to encounter this claim so early on (and that her therapist would have shared this still feels wrong). But in detonating the taboo at the beginning, Lubow defuses it, too. (No spoiler alert here.) It is not the climax of the book, but one more beveled pane of the window onto its subject.
The most exhaustive biography of the great photographer written to date, Diane Arbus coincides with a retrospective of Arbus’s unseen early work at the Met Breuer and, also on view in New York, photographs from two incredible oeuvres that build on her interest in the ordinary lives of the marginalized and her deep—at times controversial—involvement in capturing them: Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” slideshow at the Museum of Modern Art and Danny Lyon’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Goldin and Lyon also share Arbus’s belief in the need to have images around you at all times, like talismans.) It’s an embarrassment of riches to visit these shows all in one season. Arbus’s work has only grown more present with time: Once we see a photograph by her, it is, like a secret, impossible to shake. Held in its thrall, we realize we’ve been thinking about it all along.
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