IN JUNE 1968 DIANE and her daughters, Doon and Amy, moved from their Charles Street stable house to a duplex at the top of a brownstone at 120 East 10th Street. There was a brick-walled living room with many windows and a skylight, a kitchen, and, below the living room, two bedrooms. The rent was $275 a month.
Diane thought the place would be wonderfully cozy. She put all her plants around, and her X-ray of a human hand (whose is not known), and then she painted the exposed brick wall white and had a Japanese artist friend construct plaster-of-paris banquettes so that the entire apartment looked sculpted—the furniture appeared free-floating or molded into the walls. The place resembled a cave—rather like one of the rooms she’d designed when she was a student at Fieldston.
Not long after she moved in, her landlady, Judith Mortenson, took her to Macy’s. “I wanted to buy her a new fridge. I wanted her to be happy there. Diane chose the biggest one available, and white—I’d hoped she’d choose salmon or pale green. She didn’t seem particularly pleased about it. I got the feeling she was depressed and anxious. I got that feeling every time I saw her.”
Mortenson lived in the building, too, so would often run into Diane in the hall. “She was usually with her two daughters—they were all dressed like hippies. They seemed very private—very close.”
And they were. Diane always encouraged the girls to be independent and free, and never intruded on their lives—she wanted them to “create themselves.” So when Amy had a weight problem, Diane didn’t even comment. And when Doon decided to work for Richard Avedon, Diane offered no opinion either, although she expressed her concern to Pat Peterson, worrying that “Doon might fall in love with Dick because he’s so bright and mercurial and rich and successful and then Doon might get hurt.” (This presumably never happened, since Doon still works for Avedon periodically. Not long ago she wrote the copy for the controversial Calvin Klein ads—“There’s nothing between me and my Calvins”—which Avedon photographed.)
In 1968 Diane was behaving more like an older sister or friend to both girls, and they in turn were exceedingly protective and maternal. Doon has written in Ms. magazine of the many wrestling matches on her bed with her mother and sometimes with her sister, too. Her mother always won. “And when I think of it now I have the feeling she tricked me into losing…I have wondered since whether her subjects ever felt the way I did in those moments, that she had perpetuated some gentle sort of deception that had made me want to lose.”
Diane’s goddaughter, May Eliot, saw her from time to time. May was diffident, frail, unsure of herself, and Diane responded to that. They had dinner in Chinatown when Alex and Jane Eliot flew over from Europe, concerned for May’s well-being—she had just gotten divorced. “Diane interceded for me—she came to my defense.” Later they shared a cab uptown and May didn’t want the ride to end—they’d begun to talk so frankly to each other; when they met again, they exchanged confidences like two women alone in the world and Diane blurted out that she had to be “very gay around Marvin or he couldn’t take it—he couldn’t take her despair.”
While living in the East Village, Diane continued fighting an unrelieved depression. The depression had never completely disappeared after she contracted hepatitis in 1966—it had subsided briefly, but now it was unrelenting. The therapist continued to prescribe anti-depressants, including Vivactil, but nothing seemed to help and by the summer of 1968 she had other symptoms: she began experiencing nausea and weight loss.
The photographer Saul Leiter, who also lived on East 10th Street, would help her carry her laundry when she felt too weak to do it herself. He noticed her lassitude, her melancholia. Once she asked him if he knew any “battered people for her to photograph.” He said he didn’t.
Diane subsequently went to another doctor (some friends said later he was a “quack”), who told her she was anemic and prescribed a high-protein diet. For a while she existed on hamburger and desiccated liver, and when she entertained, which was rarely, she fed people peculiarly.
To boost her spirits, Avedon and Israel had got her involved in Steve Laurence’s new Picture Newspaper, an all-photograph large-format publication that lasted through twelve issues from 1968 to 1971. There were various meetings about it at Avedon’s studio, followed by more meetings at Diane’s duplex. She seemed enthusiastic about what Laurence was doing and eventually let him use a photograph of Dracula taken off a TV set. She also let him use a picture of a crying baby along with a torn print of the pimply pro-war demonstrator wearing the I’M PROUD button.
“Diane pulled the prints out from a big stack at the bottom of her closet,” Laurence writes. “Most of the photographs were next to shoes and junk. Afterwards she cooked up a huge mound of hamburger in a frying pan and offered me some—part of it very burned—as she talked. She advised me about diet and health. She seemed terrified of getting sick.”
By July 1968 she was feeling no better, and she had lost eight pounds. She believed she still had all the symptoms of hepatitis, but the various doctors she went to could not diagnose her case. At one point she phoned Cheech, whom she rarely saw now, and asked, “Can you catch hepatitis from going to bed with a lot of people you don’t know?” Cheech says she was so appalled by the question she couldn’t answer.
On July 18, complaining of dizziness, nausea, and back pains, she was admitted to Doctors’ Hospital for observation and remained there for almost two weeks, undergoing a series of tests, including the 9.5 series, gallbladder tests, and a liver series, and with some apprehension she agreed to a liver biopsy. She was sleeping a great deal and feeling unduly weak. When Peter Crookston passed through New York, he saw Diane. “She looked wasted,” he recalls.
After more tests Diane’s condition was diagnosed as “toxic hepatitis ostensibly secondary to the combination of drugs used for depression and birth control.” She was immediately taken off all the drugs (including Vivactil) and given lots of vitamins. She began feeling better.
Released on August 5, she went home to recuperate, resting for long periods in bed and eating children’s food—Jell-O, oatmeal, mush. She rarely went back to a conventional diet, relying on raw and unprocessed foods as well as jars of honey for nourishment. Allan came by regularly to cheer her up, and after he left, she would phone Irene Fay and report, “My husband is taking wonderful care of me.”
She still felt very weak. Eventually Marvin Israel took her to a party at attorney Jay Gold’s. Loring Eutemay remembers that “Diane looked really awful. Hollowed out. Gray-skinned. Like a concentration-camp victim.”
She wrote to Crookston: “During convalescence a strange rage developed in me, appearing every night like a werewolf. It feels like a raw wild power. I don’t know how you make it energy.”
It was deep in the summer and very hot, and when she couldn’t sleep and was restless in her depression, she would go up to the roof of her building and curl up there. Sometimes she would knock on Seymour Krim’s door. Krim, an iconoclastic writer, a chronicler of the beats, was currently editing Nugget magazine. He had lived in the apartment below Diane’s—one tiny room overflowing with books—for more than twenty years, cooking on his hot plate, laboring over his unpublished novels, grinding out his energetic essays. He hoped to die there, he said.
Krim would invite Diane in and they would talk. “I always thought she had an animal quality,” he says. “Quick movements—silence—withdrawal, and then a total giving and opening up. But you could never predict how she’d be. What we shared as opposed to where we differed was a concern with the troubles of living with oneself. We both came out of the psychoanalyzed generation and that concern—perhaps over-concern—with self. She was a kind friend to be with or talk to on the phone. I always felt she understood or would understand, no matter what the problem. I guess this stemmed from her own psychological duress, but it made her as intuitive as a good dancer to the moods of others.”
A book of Krim’s essays, called Shake It for the World, Smartass, was being published, and Diane offered to take his author photograph. “She snapped me sprawled across my bed, fast asleep. I liked the picture, and my publisher, Dial, used it as the cover of my book, but Diane didn’t want her name used. She said it wasn’t the kind of image she was usually identified with.”
Krim says he hadn’t told Dial to pay her because she hadn’t wanted to be credited, but of course she wanted to be paid and she put up a fight until she got her $500. Krim says, “It seemed uncharacteristically hardboiled of her.”
In spite of poor health and continued bouts of depression, Diane began working again—doing fashion spreads for Bazaar (beautiful blurred shots of Mia Farrow in lingerie) and portraits of men like Eugene McCarthy for the London Sunday Times.
After an assignment Diane might spend hours in Allan’s darkroom, printing her work. She would move back and forth in the warm, charged darkness, uncorking solutions, filling the sink with water, dipping the negatives in, watching them bloom. Allan had taught her to print slowly and carefully, but she still couldn’t resist tearing the edge of a perfect print. Sometimes she would print an image over and over again and then hang various versions up to dry and come back to study them the next day.
Now each face she was photographing dominated the frame. “The Woman in the Veil on 5th Avenue,” “The Woman in the Fur Collar”—these are heroic portraits so textured they seem almost alive on paper. The way she was now handling light intensified her images, heightened their psychological drama. “She’d obviously learned a lot from Weegee and news photographs, from Lisette Model and from Cubism, too,” her old art teacher Victor D’Amico notes. “A left eye in one of the great Arbus portraits doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to the right eye—a left shoulder to a right shoulder… Some of her finest pictures remind me of the paintings she did at school, where parts of the body had an unresolved relationship to one another.”
Diane never showed these particular photographs to her goddaughter, May, when they were together that year—and she was seeing her as often as she could since May was living alone in the Village and “feeling very insecure.” Diane would draw her out about herself or talk in her rambling fashion about Doon and her free-lance magazine assignments—the complexities of mother-daughter relationships—the mysteries that exist between human beings—the many kinds of love. “She told me how close she and Allan were,” May says. “Closer than ever, although they were about to be divorced and he was thinking of marrying somebody else.”
Soon after that talk May sent Diane some poems. Her replying letter said it was important to realize one has to write a great many terrible poems before writing a good one, and that the same was true of photography. May found the letter encouraging “because she never told me what I’d written was too personal. She seemed to trust me to work through that to something else.” In another talk Diane told her goddaughter that “in all lives there are times when we seem to lose everything and have to start at ground zero again.” Recently she had reached ground zero and watched her “gorgeous mountain of life become a desert,” but it no longer frightened her “because you have to pay the price for your existence…it’s like trees lose their leaves in winter and new leaves flower in the spring—it’s the only way you can grow…”
Late that summer Bazaar flew Diane down to Atlanta to photograph Mrs. Martin Luther King still in mourning. James Earl Ray, King’s alleged assassin, had just been caught, but there was little talk of that as Diane snapped pictures of Mrs. King standing serenely outside her home, hands clasped against her stomach, eyes raised to the skies. Diane couldn’t get over Mrs. King’s composure. Her mask would never come off—it was glued on tight! This whole business of deifying these famous widows—Jackie Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and now Coretta King… She was sure each one possessed some hidden trauma, if only she could bare it with her camera!
Ever since the “New Documents” show Diane’s phone had been ringing with requests for interviews. She was being asked to lecture around the country and to judge photography contests; photo journals were begging her to contribute. Then after the Viva pictures were published, her reputation as “a photographer of freaks” seemed to become even more of an established fact. She felt this was both exaggerated and incorrect, and it caused her great dismay. She would get defensive when anyone asked her questions about her method or choice of subject matter. She couldn’t answer specifically in any case, it wasn’t part of her nature—and most questions about photography were “terrifically boring” to her.
Now that she was no longer on antidepressants, her emotions were closer to the surface; she became easily irritated and cried a great deal. When she suddenly spoke contemptuously of a journalist she’d worked with, friends were surprised at her force; always before, she’d practiced such concealment. Jill Freedman, who later became known for photographing firemen in action, recalls how uninterested Diane was when she showed her her portfolio. “She offered absolutely no encouragement. She seemed to want to get rid of me fast.”
Another photography teacher and writer, Bill Jay, has an even more curious memory. He had come all the way from London to see Diane. He recalls going to her apartment on a very humid summer morning in 1968—“so humid I felt like a wrung-out dishrag.” When he rang the doorbell, a voice shouted, “Go away!” He kept ringing and the voice kept yelling, “Go away!” until he reminded her that they had an appointment. Eventually she let him in “after a lot of scuffling and unlocking and unbolting of the door.” And they faced each other.
“She was small and slim,” Jay remembers, “looking very energetic, and I guessed she could be extremely explosive—hot-tempered, even. She didn’t smile or observe the usual pleasantries.” Instead, as she mixed him a dish of some kind of cold jelly, she needled him with remarks such as “All photographers are boring—why should you want to see them? All magazines tell lies and yours is no exception.” The jelly prepared, she placed it in front of him and then straddled a bench so that her skirt rode up her thighs, revealing her panties—she either didn’t know or didn’t care. She glared at Jay belligerently watching while he took a mouthful of the jelly. “I thought I would vomit,” he says. “It was the most foul-tasting stuff I’d ever encountered, like a mixture of dishwashing liquid and gravy.” By this time he’d had enough, and he spat out a mouthful and told her angrily, “If I have any more, I’ll spew it all over your table!”
With that, Diane burst out laughing. “Now we can talk about photography,” she said. Jay doesn’t know whether he’d passed some bizarre test or what, but after that “she radically changed personality and was full of warmth and good humor.” Later she paved the way for him at the Museum of Modern Art with John Szarkowski. She also met him there to introduce him around; at one point she showed him a sheaf of strange photographs featuring genitalia. She said they were some of the best pictures she’d ever seen.
Sean Callahan had said that Diane often invited people to her apartment in order to “scrutinize them,” serving them strange concoctions and then waiting for their reactions. Yet when Lee Witkin (whose New York gallery was devoted exclusively to photography) was invited for an early breakfast, he was served an excellent plate of bacon and eggs. “Diane ate nothing, just watched me eat—stared at me without saying anything, which was a bit disconcerting. Finally I asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she answered, ‘You’re eating,’ and I said, ‘Well, sure I… What do you expect I’d be doing? You just served me breakfast,’ and she answered, ‘Most of them don’t eat.’
“Afterward she showed me a portfolio of her work and I did a terrible thing. When I saw the twins, I said off the top of my head, ‘I don’t see what all the excitement’s about.’ She didn’t explain or deny the statement, which was a stupid one. The twins is a great photograph, but you have to look at it for a while before it sinks in—it’s so personal.
“In spite of my idiotic remark, she allowed me to exhibit some of her pictures in late ‘69, but she wouldn’t let me overmat them, even though they’d ripple. I told her they should be matted so they’d look more like art objects, but she said she didn’t want them to look like art objects. I wanted to give her a show, but she was very reluctant, evasive, whenever I brought up the subject. I’d say, ‘Why not, Diane?’ and she’d never answer.
“Nobody bought her work while it was at the Witkin except for a young photographer named Bevan Davies, who saved his money and purchased two signed Arbuses [the Russian midgets and the pimply boy with the American flag]. They cost $150 apiece. These same photographs are now worth $4500 apiece.”
Davies, who was then in his twenties, says that when he saw the Arbus portraits he knew they were very important. “I couldn’t say why, I just knew they were, and that I had to own them. They were a big influence on me.”
Davies subsequently met Diane in Central Park. “I’d never seen her before, but I knew it was she from the way she was photographing—intensely concentrated, very intimate with her subjects.” He introduced himself, explaining how much he admired her, and she invited him to her apartment on East 10th Street. “Without her cameras she seemed introverted, self-conscious. She looked at my pictures, which were very derivative of her work…she told me that, while it wasn’t good to copy her, it was something every artist goes through before he evolves a style of his own. She was right.
“On another evening Diane took photographs of me—which I never saw, by the way. I remember we were walking down the street and suddenly she started shooting me and there was instant psychic communication between us. It was almost palpable. And I realized why she was such a great photographer. She was so disarming—she had this uncanny ability to relate to her subjects. She was very girlish—open, and interested in you. She asked very sharp questions, questions you couldn’t resist answering because they were questions you’d been secretly asking yourself.”
After he showed her work, Witkin says, “We never had any more long discussions about anything. She always seemed to be floating somewhere. She acted giggly, for instance, when she participated in a slide show with Gene Smith at the American Society of Magazine Photographers.”
Yet she spent hours at Witkin’s gallery when he exhibited Lewis Hine, the great slum photographer of the early 1900s. She told Witkin that she thought Hine was one of the great photographers, along with Sander and Weegee.
Weegee died in 1968, but Diane discovered that Wilma Wilcox, Weegee’s common-law wife, still lived in his dilapidated brownstone on West 57th Street. The house was crammed with junk. Diane began going through shopping bags full of negatives and prints, and she found all kinds of hitherto unpublished pictures. She told Witkin and he started coming to the brownstone, too. “Weegee was a consummate slob,” Witkin says. “It was a wild place.”
Weegee claimed to have covered five thousand murders, and though he turned squeamish at the sight of blood, he had been, to use his own words, “spellbound by the mystery of murder.” Diane would pore over his photographs. Many were discreetly distanced from the corpses, but Weegee always captured the horrified expressions on the faces of the onlookers.
In August, Mad magazine’s art director, John Putnam, ran into Diane near Bank Street, and they walked together for a while. “Diane and I often talked about France,” Putnam said. “She couldn’t get over the fact that I still spoke French like a native. Sometimes I’d translate Proust for her, or Charles Trenet lyrics. She told me she’d had a French nanny as a kid and had once believed she spoke French fluently, but no longer could remember a word of it.”
That morning they strolled near the Hudson River docks, where they both photographed often, and they spoke of the Chicago riots. The newspapers and TV had been full of stories of the fires in Lincoln Park, the huge sleep-in, the confrontations between the hippies and police. This led to a free-wheeling and rather disjointed discussion about their own children and the sixties generation in general—most of whom, they decided, were into dope and rock and not believing anything. Putnam said he’d gotten exasperated by how “media was turning Vietnam into an event, not an aberration,” and with that Diane murmured, “People think our depravity is only temporary.”
He asked her if she regretted not being in Chicago to photograph the faces of the young—of the spaced-out, despairing radicals, the anarchists, the yippies in their beads and paint. And she answered no, she wanted to photograph blind people again. James Thurber. Helen Keller maybe. Borges. And she wished she could photograph Homer, if only he were still around. Poets were such a special breed, she said—so heroic. In the meantime she had lots of assignments; none of them particularly excited her, but she tried solving the problems she was having in her own projects with her magazine journalism. And as they were talking Putnam was struck by an “aura of aloneness” about her. She was really a solitary figure in photography, he thought, struggling intensely to turn grotesque and shocking subject matter into poetry. And she was working in such a paradoxical combination of styles (the snapshot, heroic portraiture) that the public felt threatened by her images. And nobody except possibly Marvin Israel and John Szarkowski understood or cared about what she was trying to do. Not until the 1980s would her style and content be called significant and a major influence in photography, and even then her work would still be sometimes compared to “a horror show.”
The last thing Putnam recalls Diane saying is that she was going on a story with Gail Sheehy to Queens; Sheehy was writing a piece for New York magazine on “The Important Order of Red Men,” a branch of the American Legion which consisted of former plumbers and druggists and bank clerks, all of whom dressed up in Indian feathers and brandished sequined tomahawks. The two women spent most of the day with the group, and Diane took a forceful portrait of a grinning man in a huge Indian headdress which was later part of her posthumous show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Afterward Diane and Sheehy had coffee and discussed their daughters and how emotionally insecure a mother alone could be. Sheehy had recently separated from her husband; Diane wanted to know how she coped with loneliness.
Diane’s life had grown increasingly lonely. Both Doon and Amy were busy and often away from the apartment, and since her most recent bout with hepatitis she didn’t always have the strength to see people, so she kept in touch by phone. She could talk on the phone for hours with Pati Hill or Richard Avedon or Mariclare Costello, Allan’s girl. Sometimes she would see the Hollywood producer John Calley when he passed through New York. Calley was a brooding, handsome man nicknamed “the Dark Angel” by his colleagues. He had worked his way up from gas-station attendant to powerful studio executive (he ultimately headed Warners during the 1970s). Diane would visit him in the apartment in the East Seventies which he’d sublet and afterward they might have dinner with the screenwriter Buck Henry. Diane once brought along a portfolio of strange photographs of genitalia for the men to look at while they ate. It was the same batch of photographs she’d shown Bill Jay.
Occasionally she would photograph group sex parties. That was how she’d met poet/painter Stanley Fisher (now deceased), who’d participated in the “Doom, No!” and “Shit” shows at the Gertrude Stein gallery. (These garish art exhibits ridiculing a “plastic America” featured “the ultimate bowel movement” sculpture, as well as Fisher’s shocking collages, photographs of concentration-camp victims superimposed on Betty Grable’s nipples.)
Fisher’s main preoccupation was sex. He was at the time “master” to three young female “slaves” in a shabby but immaculate apartment on King Street. Diane went there to take pictures of Fisher, a former Brooklyn schoolteacher, handsome, blue-eyed, perpetually angry, sitting regally in a shabby old armchair railing against sexual repression in America. He had been in Reichian therapy, and believed that sex was the driving force in life; he would lecture obsessively about the need for frequent orgasms in order to stay healthy, and his female “slaves” (or “tribe,” as he called them) would hang on his every word—they never interrupted him except to go into the kitchen, where they would peel potatoes for dinner. If Fisher left the apartment (usually to make another “sexual conquest”), his “slaves” would follow him down the street, trotting behind him—out of deference, in homage.
Eventually Diane tried photographing Fisher orchestrating a group sex party and she was fascinated by his attempts to include everybody in such a mysterious act. She said later to a class, “The situation is both real and unreal and you have to deal with both…it’s all different kinds of theater… I mean the spanking…there’s a whole race of spanking people who are absolutely dotty about it.”
However, Diane did not think enough of her group-sex photographs to develop many of the negatives. Neil Selkirk, who has printed virtually all her work since her death, maintains that there are “no erotic pictures in her files” except for a set of contacts which include one image that Harold Hayes describes as “remarkable.” He saw it tacked on the wall in Diane’s Charles Street house, and he says, “It was of a couple fucking, and I’ll never forget it because it was such a total expression of stasis, of detachment. The sexual act was all one saw, divorced from everything else.” (This particular image is listed in the Arbus catalogue and may still be available from the Arbus estate’s dealer, Harry Lunn, in Washington, D.C.)
Selkirk believes that this and one other picture (taken in a bondage house) are the only such Arbus pictures in existence. He believes that “a great many incorrect stories have circulated about Diane’s so-called pornographic pictures because she did photograph at some orgies. But obviously she didn’t think that the results were impressive enough to keep.” Selkirk goes on, “Diane would never limit herself to just the aberrant or sexual; she was interested in photographing a wide range of people and events.”
She would eventually tell fashion editor Carol Troy that she hoped to station herself inside Henri Bendel and “photograph a host of shoppers when things are ‘on sale.’ ” She wrote to Peter Crookston of her plan to photograph fat ladies and capture the psychological panic brought on by overeating; and possibly women who’d had plastic surgery, “if they’ll admit it.” And she wanted to photograph the Kronhausens—sex therapists who at the time had an open marriage; they ran a museum in San Francisco that featured their collection of erotic art. (The Kronhausens had given Diane the pictures of genitalia which she continued to show to everyone.) In late 1968 she was about to undertake a search for a couple who shared a “folie à deux.” She looked for this phenomenon in twins, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and a couple in a mental institution. For a while she considered the possibility of photographing schizophrenic patients under treatment by the controversial analyst R. D. Laing, whose existential theories were very popular during the sixties; he believed that no one can begin to think or feel or act except out of his alienation. Laing viewed schizophrenia as a valid experience—simply a negation of the negative experience of an alienated culture.
At Christmas, Diane flew to St. Croix with Pat Peterson to shoot another entire issue of children’s fashions for The New York Times Magazine. Once more her pictures of kids are blunt and unsentimental, and in some of them she seems, astonishingly, to reveal the shape of their faces as adults.
When she got back from St. Croix, she ran into Studs Terkel at a party. Terkel recalls: “I knew her brother Howard already—had interviewed him for my radio show in Chicago. I was starting to do a book on the 1930s Depression—Hard Times, it was later called—and I guess I told Diane about it, and then she mentioned that her father had been a colorful character during the Depression—running Russeks, staying afloat during and after the Crash. And how she and Howard had grown up as rich kids isolated on Central Park West, and at the time she hadn’t been aware at all of the poverty, the bread lines. Which had bugged her in retrospect. So I decided I’d interview her for my book. She was called ‘Daisy Singer’ (most of the people I interviewed were given pseudonyms). But first we had lunch to get better acquainted.
“We went to a restaurant in the Village. Up close Diane looked like a little girl to me. Dressed in a leather miniskirt, I think. I remember indelibly—there was a sense of out of time about her, she wasn’t quite there. Even though she was warm and friendly and terribly vulnerable, she was never quite there. And she had so little self-esteem—I remember that about her, too. So many self-doubts. And she talked about men using her. Some Hollywood type. And a writer or a critic…”
Afterward they went to the Arbus studio on Washington Place and Terkel taped her for a couple of hours. He kept trying to get her to talk about the Depression, “but she kept getting sidetracked, recalling anecdotes about her family—her father and mother—and she talked about art and money and courage, not necessarily in that order. I asked few questions; it just kept pouring out.”
“My father was a kind of self-made man,” Diane told Terkel. “After he died I found in his drawer—along with his condoms—a credo of ten things he wanted to achieve. One was to make a million dollars. My brother pointed out that for a man who had his heart set on being rich, what he achieved was totally inadequate. My brother pointed out also that while we were rich, my father was a gambler and something of a phony. That he could always appear richer than he was. His friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant of them and in a sense he made what he made go a long way. It was a front. My father was a frontal person. A front had to be maintained…in business if people smell failure, you’ve had it. I’ve learned to lie as a photographer, Studs. There are times when I come to work in certain guises, pretend to be poorer than I am—acting, looking poor.”
She continued: “I always had governesses. I had one I really loved until I was seven and then I had a succession of ones I really loathed. I remember going with this governess that I loved—liked—to the park to the site of the reservoir which had been drained; it was just a cavity and there was this shanty town there. For years I couldn’t get anyone to remember this, but finally someone at the Museum of the City of New York said yes, there was this shanty town. This image wasn’t concrete, but for me it was a potent memory. Seeing the other side of the tracks holding the hand of one’s governess. For years I felt exempt. I grew up exempt and immune from circumstance. That idea that I couldn’t wander down…and that there is such a gulf. I keep learning this over and over again…the difference between rich people and poor people. I’m fascinated with how people begin because it influences their attitudes about money and everything else…
“[My brother and I] never went far afield…the outside world was so far. Not evil, but the doors were simply shut. You were never expected to encounter it. For so long I lived as if there was contagion. I guess you would call it innocence, but I wouldn’t call it pretty at all…
“I grew up thinking all my minimal conjecture was true. I thought I’d been born knowledgeable; that what I knew came from beyond the grave. I mean before birth. I didn’t want to give up that wisdom for the ordinary knowledge of experience, which is the way I confirmed the way my parents brought me up, which is the less you experience, the better. You know what I mean? I’m accusative…what I mean is my mother never taught me courage and I don’t mean to accuse her—parents only teach by default. What I learned was, if you were weak—if you didn’t know something—all you had to do was confess it and then it would be all right—that’s what femininity constituted in that time, and you found a man to take care of you in exchange for being taken care of. You see, I never suffered from adversity… I was confirmed in a sense of unreality.
“I’ve always been ashamed of making money, and when I do make money from a photograph, I immediately assume it’s not as good a photograph.
“I can’t believe that money is any proper reward for art. Art seems to me something you do because it makes you feel good to do it; it excites you or you learn something from it; it’s like your play, your education…but I’ve never felt in a funny way…I don’t even feel [what I do] is terribly useful. It might be historical. It’s embarrassing. I can’t defend this position, but I think I take photographs because there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them. When I was gloomy I thought other people could take the photographs I wanted to take. You know, I could call up some good photographer and say, ‘Why don’t you photograph this and this?’ I really think my photographs aren’t very useful except to me. I think I have a slight corner on something about the quality of things…
“It’s very subtle and I don’t know that it’s world-shaking, but I’ve always had this terrific conceit. I used to think I was the perfect thermometer for the times. If I liked a movie, it would be a popular movie… You grow up split between these two things—thinking you’re utterly average and inclusive or that every human emotion has its echo in you. Well, I do feel that in a certain way.”
Finally, Terkel asked her, “How did the public experience of the Depression affect you?” and Diane answered, “I was aware of it partly because it didn’t affect me. That sense of being immune—ludicrous as it sounds—was painful.
“[Now] I seek danger and excitement. It may be frivolous of me, [but] I’ve come to believe you can only really learn by being touched by something.”
During the interview Diane kept referring to the horrific poverty she’d seen in South Carolina. A month earlier Esquire had sent her down to photograph Donald E. Gatch, a young white doctor who was trying to combat starvation and maggots in an impoverished black community called Beaufort. He had reported the shocking conditions to the local health authorities, but nobody would listen to him, so he was caring for the poor alone, with little federal funding.
Diane told Terkel: “I had never seen poverty like that.” She had gone with Gatch to a home with sixteen children. “One child had only one eye, another was hydrocephalic.” Another was scarred at birth; some showed symptoms of worms caused by filthy outhouses.
She and Gatch drove all over the countryside—to factories where women shucked oysters at $15 a season. He told her “incredible stories,” she recalled to Terkel. About examining a dead woman whose body was infested with maggots. And another woman “with an illegitimate, mentally defective boy who couldn’t get welfare, so she had to go to work and leave the boy chained to the bed.”
And Diane had photographed Gatch standing outside a falling-down shack and inside stinking cabins fetid with the smell of old urine and up on the hills where some poor whites lived so inbred the children had one blue eye, one brown.
She took roll after roll of film which recorded the inbreeding, malnutrition, and pathological depression of deep Southern poverty (“as well as Walker Evans,” Gene Thornton wrote in the Times when many of these pictures were finally exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1980. “What a picture of deformity and imbecility”).
And Terkel said, “You saw what Walker Evans saw.” And Diane replied, “Somewhat similar. Yeah. But now I’m seeing with double vision. With what I learned as a kid and what I’ve since learned. It seems to me the only pleasure about getting old is if you come through with more understanding than you had in the first place.”