Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience

Notes

215 Notes Introduction 1. John Szarkowski showed August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit in 1963. However, Arbus was aware of Sander as early as 1959, if not before. In 1959, the Swiss magazine Du published a portfolio of Sander photographs entitled “Deutsche Menschen.” Arbus’s close friend Marvin Israel gave her a copy of the portfolio shortly after its publication. She even explained the title of one of the pictures, “Schmierenschauspieler,” in a postcard to Israel, dated January 24, 1960: “[He] is a third-rate provincial actor, maybe in a traveling company. German words are wonderful the way they contain whole paragraphs” (Revelations, 148). 2. The term panorama refers to landscape but also may be used to refer to a collection of portraits. I do not mean to imply the broader claim that “social panorama” represents a new form of critical social gallery, merely that it represents a wider social vision than social galleries, even Sander’s. The term further makes sense in light of a book in Arbus’s library entitled Panorama of Prestidigitators, by Milbourne Christopher (New York: Christopher Collection, 1956), a collection of vignettes on magicians. 3. Susan Sontag was the first to comment on this connection to pop art, noting that Arbus’s statements reflected the “childlike wonder of the pop mentality.” See Sontag’s “America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly,” in On Photography (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977), 41. 4. For a sensitive, critical, and thorough discussion of the problems of the contemporary art-historical monograph (and some solutions to the problem), see Douglas R. Nickel, introduction to Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9–19. 5. Maurice Berger, in his The Politics of Experience: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 1988), 5–6, notes that “arthistorical analysis of the complex culture of the 1960s has fearfully distanced itself from the political and social issues of the period” by art historians “trained to protect the sanctity of the autonomous museum object.” This argument can be extended to include Arbus’s work, which holds a prominent place in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection of photography. 216 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 6. Arbus, text accompanying “The Full Circle,” Harper’s Bazaar, November 1961, 133–37, in Magazine Work, 14. 7. See C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961); and Robert Lindner, Must You Conform ? (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1956). 8. Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion” (1947), Harper’s Bazaar, November 1961, 138. 9. Richard Avedon, Harper’s Bazaar, November 1961, 125. 10. Ibid., 138–39. 11. Diane Arbus, “Two American Families,” Sunday Times Magazine (London), November 10, 1968, 56–57. 12. Diane Arbus, “Five Photographs by Diane Arbus,” Artforum 9, no. 9 (May 1971): 64. 13. Victor Burgin, “Photographic Practice and Art Theory,” Studio International 190 (August 1975): 39. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 41. Burgin describes his usage of the term ideology: “By ideology we mean, in its broadest sense, a complex of propositions about the natural and social world which would be generally accepted in a given society as describing the actual, indeed necessary, nature of the world and its events. . . . What is essential about it is that it is contingent and within it the fact of its contingency is suppressed. . . . It is in this taking for granted as natural and immutable that which is historical and contingent that we encounter ideology in the classic Marxist sense” (41). 16. Arbus’s “Notes on the Nudist Camp” was not published. See Magazine Work, 68–69. 17. See Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984), 176– 78. Despite its much-maligned (and rightly so) overdependence on sensationalistic biographical details, the Bosworth biography provides a number of important starting points for Arbus scholars, such as Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel. 18. Letter from Diane Arbus to Robert Benton, undated, ca. October 1959, quoted in Revelations, 144. 19. Letter from Arbus to Benton, undated, ca. 1960, quoted in Thomas Southall, “The Magazine Years, 1960–1971,” in Magazine Work, 156. 20. Ibid, 157. 21. James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 220. 22. Diane Arbus, photocopy of her 1963 Guggenheim proposal, “American Rites, Manners, and Customs,” reprinted in Revelations, 41. 23. Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason...