Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs
Diane Arbus, Mrs. Gladys 'Mitzi' Ulrich with the baby, Sam, a stump-tailed macaque monkey, North Bergen N.J. 1971, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase. © 1971 The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC
“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”
—Diane Arbus, 1971
In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. At the time of her death in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A box of ten photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by photographer Richard Avedon; another by artist Jasper Johns. A fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, for whom Arbus added an eleventh photograph.
Description
This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, using the set that Arbus assembled for Feitler, which was acquired by SAAM in 1986. The story is a crucial one because it was the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career, ushering in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, “With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer. . . deny its status as art. . . . What changed everything was the portfolio itself.”
In May 1971, Arbus was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which also showcased her work on its cover. In June 1972, the portfolio was sent to Venice, where Arbus was the first photographer included in a Biennale, at that time the premiere international showcase for contemporary artists. SAAM organized the American contribution to the Biennale that year, thereby playing an important early role in Arbus’s legacy.
John Jacob, the McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at SAAM, organized the exhibition. The catalogue, copublished with the Aperture Foundation, features an in-depth essay by Jacob that presents new and compelling scholarship and adds significant detail to the period between her death and the 1972 posthumous retrospective at MoMA.
Visiting Information
April 6, 2018
–
January 27, 2019
Open Daily, 11:30 a.m.–7:00 p.m
Free Admission
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The program features a panel discussion about Arbus, the magazine era, and A box of ten photographs. The panel is comprised of photographers who knew Arbus and other experts who have devoted decades to the study and understanding of her work. They respond to a selection of archival audio clips—including excerpts by Harold Hayes, Esquire editor from 1963 to 1973, Marvin Israel, Harper’s Bazaar art director from 1961 to 1963, recalling their interactions with Arbus, and artist Jasper Johns, who purchased A box of ten photographs from her.
Panel Participants:
- John Jacob, McEvoy Family Curator for Photography, SAAM
- Jeffrey Fraenkel, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA
- John Gossage, photographer, Washington, DC
- Karan Rinaldo, Collections Specialist, The Diane Arbus Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
- Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
- Neil Selkirk, photographer, New York, NY
Panel Participants by edited, pre-recorded audio:
- Harold Hayes, editor, Esquire (1926 – 1989)
- Marvin Israel, art director, Harper’s Bazaar (1924 – 1984)
- Jasper Johns, artist, owner of A box of ten photographs
Panel Contributors:
- The Estate of Diane Arbus
- Peter Bunnell, photography historian
- Stephen A. Frank, photographer
- Bill Katz, designer
- Jean-Claude Lemagny, Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Maureen Pskowski, Jasper Johns Studio
- Fraenkel Gallery
- Pier 24 Photography
- The Diane Arbus Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Special Thanks:
- The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
- Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman
- RayKo Photo
- The Bernie Stadiem Endowment Fund
- The Trellis Fund
- Robin Wright and Ian Reeves
All photographs and texts by Diane Arbus, copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus
Considered in relation to the portfolio, the odyssey of Diane Arbus is the odyssey of photography itself, the odyssey of a field and of its language. Therefore, it also felt important to include the voices of some who speak that contemporary language in conversation with others who preceded them, and didn’t. In doing so, we register the portfolio as bridging not only Arbus’ life and her posthumous career, but also the magazine era, and that of the museum.
In tonight’s presentation we’ll hear from both historical and contemporary voices from the field. Accompany them we’ll see the evolution of Arbus’ photography in four magazine spreads published between 1960 and 1971. From the perspective of the magazine era, these four spreads represent Arbus’ struggle to establish both her financial independence and a stable artistic identity.
From our own moment looking retrospectively, we’ll also see the evolution of an Arbus canon grounded in her work on the portfolio, its solidification as a consequence of her untimely death, and the emergency of a discourse as institutions sought to accommodate and respond to the challenges with that canon. Contemporary photographic discourse begins with Diane Arbus’ work. And intentionally or not, A Box of Ten Photographs is that work’s grand summation.
The portfolio established the foundation for Arbus’ later fame, bridging a lifetime of modest recognition with a posthumous career of extraordinary acclaim and ushering in photography’s acceptance into the realm of serious art. The idea of what photography was and of what it could be was irrevocably changed.
Our speakers tonight, both dead and alive, I’m going to introduce to you now. When we first started talking about this event, we were going to title it “Conversations with the Dead” or “Listening to the Dead.” But then we decided we would include some of the living, as well, so that didn’t seem completely appropriate, and so we arrived at “The Odyssey of Diane Arbus.”
So our speakers in their order of appearance, Harold Hayes was the editor of Esquire Magazine from 1963 to 1973. He was a primary figure in the literary movement known as New Journalism and with Art Director Robert Benton, worked with Diane Arbus on the article, “The Vertical Journey, Six Movements of a Moment within the Heart of the City,” published by Esquire in July, 1960. Karan Rinaldo, alive [laughter], Collection Specialist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has been manager of the Diane Arbus archive since 2008. She received an MA in Library Science from Queens College and prior to the Met, worked in cataloguing, archival practice, and collections management at the Museum of Modern Art Library, the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University Library, and the Museum of the City of New York.
— (Karan Rinaldo) I’d like to add something. I also have a master’s in Art History from Hunter College.
— (John Jacob) You know, I copied this off the Met’s page, [laughter]. John Gossage.
— (John Gossage) Alive. [laughter]
— (John Jacob) Alive. Became interested in photography at an early age. He left school at age 16 and began taking private lesson - lessons from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch and Bruce Davidson. After he met Diane Arbus, John told me he gave up portraiture. [laughter] Now based in Washington, D.C., John is widely recognized for his artist books and other publications using photographs to explore under-recognized elements of the urban environment and the relationship between architecture and power.
Marvin Israel was an American artist and art director from New York City. From 1961 to ’63 he was art director for Harper’s Bazaar where he worked with Diane Arbus. After Esquire declined to publish her story on eccentrics, Israel published it in 1961 under the title, “The Full Circle.” It was Israel who suggested to Arbus that she work on a portfolio and it was he who designed the case that doubles as a frame.
Neil Selkirk moved from London to New York City in 1970 and worked as assistant for photographer Hiro at the studio of Richard Avedon. The following year he studied with Diane Arbus in her master class. After Arbus’ death, Selkirk studied her arduous printing methods and he is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints from her negatives. In 2005 Selkirk directed the documentary film, “Who is Marvin Israel?”
Jeff Rosenheim is center, is curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photography, the author of ten books on Walker Evans. He is the steward of the Walker Evans archive, which the Met acquired in 1994 and also the custodian of the Diane Arbus archive. Rosenheim has curated numerous exhibitions, including the recent Diane Arbus in the beginning from 2017 and he’s lectured and published essays on a wide range of artists. Whew, we’re getting there. [Laughter]
Jeffrey Fraenkel opened the Fraenkel Gallery in 1979 and has presented over 300 exhibitions on photography from early master’s to contemporary practioners as diverse as Hilla and Bernd Becher, Walker Evans, Eugene Atshay, Edward Weston, Sol LeWitt and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The gallery is the primary representative for the work of Diane Arbus and is publisher of Diane Arbus: The Libraries, a beautiful book from 2004, as well as Alexander Nemerov’s Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov.
Finally, Jasper Johns is a celebrated painter, sculptor and printmaker whom The New York Times recently named America’s foremost living artist. In 1970 after seeing it advertised in Art Forum, Johns purchased A Box of Ten Photographs from Diane Arbus. It was the last of the four portfolios she completed before her death and he was the only buyer not already well-known to her. His conversation about the portfolio for this exhibition is the only known remembrance of A Box of Ten Photographs by one of its original owners.
So after that, I’m going to have a little sip and then we are going to dive right in. We’ll begin tonight’s presentation with the recollection by Editor Harold Hayes of Diane Arbus’ visit to the offices of Esquire magazine where he and art director Robert Benton were working on a special issue on New York City.
— (Harold Hayes) This is background for the entrance into the offices of Esquire of Diane Arbus. Now the inception of this story came about because we had decided, I believe it was for the July 1960 issue to do a whole issue on New York City. And magazines do this, and have done it for many, many years. But we wanted to do something that was different.
And we had, when a magazine is put together that way, a variety of stories were found and writers were found and one does the obligatory story on restaurants and places to go and who are the most important people in the city, and so on. And we had all of that in the issue. In the fall of 1959 Arbus took some of her photographs to Robert Benton, art director of Esquire. This is routine with magazines. When a photographer wants to get published, the photographer goes on to see the art director with a portfolio of what he or she has done.
— (John Jacob) In her appointment book for September 14th, 1959, Arbus wrote to Esquire, C. Benton and 44 prints, a list of photographs appears on the facing page. Hayes and Benton were so impressed with what they saw that they initially considered assigning Arbus the entire project, the entire issue. Fearing that to do so might overwhelm it, they offered her a single portfolio of photographs and helped secure a wider range of photographs than she had had access to previously. I’ve asked Karan Rinaldo to prepare a selection of the photographs that Arbus might have shown to Benton and Hayes and to speak from the perspective of the archive about what Arbus might have shown them at that meeting.
— (Karan Rinaldo) So as you can see, we’re lucky – well, as you just saw, we’re lucky to have Arbus’ appointment books in the archive. They tell us a lot about, they just are a font of so much information, what she might have brought to Esquire. Amazingly, she made a list. It’s there. There are things like preacher, which you’ll see, street preacher and shower and fire eater. So that’s what she brought to Esquire and was subsequently assigned “The Vertical Journey” assignment.
None of the photographs you’re looking at here which are selected from the In the Beginning show from 2016 were actually ultimately in “The Vertical Journey.” You’ll see one of the subjects, I’m not sure when he comes out. But Andy Ratoucheff, who was a performer at Hubert’s Museum, profile is also on the list, girl in profile. And Andy actually is one of the subjects who’s in “The Vertical Journey” ultimately and, if you were here for the slideshow earlier, is one of the three midgets on West 100th Street. Barber shop is also on the list. Not Andy yet.
— (John Jacob) What I like about s that the little squib titles were an interesting thing for the archive to try to figure out how it matched. And it was quite wonderful to have those two things.
— (Karan Rinaldo) And many of the things we can identify, like there’s Lefkowitz, which is on the list, which was not in the show, but which is a print that’s in the archive, fire eater. And yeah, we weren’t able to tell quite what everything on that list was, but it’s incredible that the list even exists of what she might have taken. Street fair, street preacher, street fair, shower. There’s Andy. And then the seated female impersonator actually came somewhat after, probably wasn’t something that she took, but was one of the projects that was part of “The Vertical Journey,” but not published.
— (John Jacob) “The Vertical Journey” appeared in the July, 1960 issue of Esquire. In our second clip from Hayes, he reads a series of letters to and from Arbus related to a follow-up story that she proposed in late 1960 on eccentrics. Having received a letter of accreditation from Esquire, she worked on the story over a period of at least six months. Ultimately the magazine declined it, ostensibly on the grounds that the photographs were too similar to those of “The Vertical Journey.” In fact, Hayes admits, the management of Esquire had determined that Arbus might get the magazine into legal duck soup and Hayes and Benton were obliged to backpedal their support of her work.
— (Harold Hayes) And Diane Arbus was off to a flying start towards a story called “The Vertical Journey.” Now this story came out and Diane Arbus made her appearance. But Diane had become someone with a singular vision unlike any photographers who had come around to the magazine at that point and with this extraordinary penchant for moving into all strata of the society, to make photographs of them.
A letter came shortly after that from Diane, which has been widely quoted and does reveal indeed the extraordinary quality of the vision that she was building for herself and what she thought about. “Dear Robert and Harold,” and the line begins about “Eccentrics,” which was a story she wanted to do. It was her word, eccentrics. “All we need are a few of the most lyrical, magical, metaphorical, like the man in New Jersey who has been collecting string for 20 years, winding it in a ball which is by now five feet in diameter sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room. And I have heard of a one-eyed lady miser that can be found in the automat. These are the characters in a fairytale for grownups. Wouldn’t it be lovely? Yes. Diane.”
And then another letter, was a sort of an omnibus letter, saying, “To whom it may concern. Diane Arbus has been assigned to do a feature for Esquire magazine, which could be anything of course. Any cooperation you can extend to her in line with, would be very much appreciated by the editors of Esquire.” “Dear Diane,” letter from me in constance of the lightbulb going on in the head of management of Esquire eventually. That there was a woman out there with a camera going god knows where involving the magazine.
“Dear Diane, enclosed is the copy for your idea about eccentrics. Since this is now a completed project, I must ask you to destroy or return, whichever you prefer, the letter of accreditation I wrote for you on November 30th, 1960.” That was the omnibus letter saying she could do anything. “Dear Harold. Enclosed is the letter of accreditation which I am both destroying and returning, since I couldn’t decide which I preferred. [Laughter] Thank you both. It seemed to me, though, that your most recent letter, this one of August 25th, was somewhat lacking in human warmth. If I am to deduce that you are feeling injured or outraged or infuriated, I now challenge and dare you to lunch with me, Benton too, RSVP. Yours, sincerely, cordially, cruelly, frankly, fondly, Diane.” [Laughter].
What we found out was that to do the story that she wanted to do would probably put us in duck soup legally. We’d never get out of it. And so we took the coward’s way out and said go somewhere else with that story. And she did, she went to Harper’s Bazaar, but that was our great loss. She stayed close enough to the magazine that we did serve as credentials for her on things we’re pretty certain we wouldn’t be able to use.
One of her most extraordinary takes was of a nudist camp in the mid’-60s. And one of the most poignant and just absolutely extraordinary takes. And she wanted to go in there and we knew damn well we weren’t going to use them, couldn’t use them, but she had to go in somehow. So we gave her a letter of assignment, do that. And that was part of the problem that she faced as she got more and more penetrating into the area of coverage that she did, how could she do this? How could people let her do it?
— (John Jacob) Like Diane Arbus, John Gossage studied with Lisette Model and like both of them, the professional milieu into which he inserted himself early on was that of a magazine photographer. At the age of 16 Gossage was expelled from high school and not long after which Esquire assigned him to photograph the very high school that had thrown him out. [Laughter]. Diane Arbus was in the same issue and they met. Arbus looked at John’s photographs and warned him that doing what others want you to do will ruin you. I’ve asked John to describe meeting Arbus and to explain what she meant by that.
— (John Gossage) Yeah. Is this on? Alright. A little bit of background. Actually I had met her about a year before the Esquire issue. It was a teenage issue, by the way. I was the token teenager for the teenage issue. And Diane had been, was photographing celebrities and their teenage children. I had met her through Bruce Davidson whose workshop we met about every week on a Thursday night, I think, and about ten photographers, and we’d bring work in and then talk about it.
I had, by happenstance and by buying a camera to shoot certain sports things, taken two square negative portraits. And at that point I had never ever seen knowledgeably an Arbus photograph. And Bruce looked at them and said there’s someone you have to meet and she has to meet you. Would you come on Saturday for brunch? So we came and she brought a little box under her arm of 8 X 10 prints and I brought my – she said bring, she said bring these too and bring your other pictures.
And I don't remember who opened the box first, but whose box first, but she looked at the two square negatives and sort of did a double take. And looked at the other pictures, and then, as I remember in this sequence, I opened her box and it was like oh my god. She’s done everything I could ever conceive of doing, and things I never conceived were possible. I didn’t say it that eloquently in my sentence, but I persisted. John said that I, when I saw her pictures I stopped making portraits. No, I was a stupid teenager. I thought I’d never seen her work. I wasn’t influenced by it. I’m not responsible. I don't have to get out of her way.
I didn’t understand that when a work of that level of genius is in front of you, there’s no way to avoid it. It’s just a fact of life, a force of nature. So I persisted for a few years, and finally got it. Oh, I can’t make square negative pictures; she’s so, so much better at this than I am. But what she did do for me, particularly – and then we met, by happenstance we met at Esquire on the same moment because there was no reason for both photographers working to be there at the same time.
And she took me aside and said, we were doing our best to avoid the assistant art directors and all the general sort of people you want to avoid when you go to a magazine. Yeah, I was delivering prints and she was doing something about the assignment. And she said, “Let’s have a cup of coffee.” She said, “John, you know, I like you, I like your work and the one advice I want to give you is, the one great regret I have about photographer is that early on when I was young, I made pictures that other people wanted me to make. And it almost totally derailed any sense of what the pictures I should have made myself.
It took me to much later in my life to realize that you shouldn’t let these people tell you what to do until you know what you want to do. Then you can use them for your own ends,” as she was doing, as we were just talking about. Esquire was giving her some money, giving her some income, but they were giving her access. She loved having a press card or a letter like that, because it gave you the initial entre in which she could then through her own persistence, charm, and intelligence, get herself to the point that she could make the pictures she needed.
It was something that was in my head at that time, but I never really spoken it until she said the words. And I stopped photographing for magazines. The reason I came to Washington is the Ford Foundation alternative education project called Walden School that I went to for two years.
And then what I did do is I at that point only photographed things that were directly connected to my life, not anything else. And if anything, this remarkable woman, incredible talent, gave me a methodology that has allowed me to work the rest of my life and I owe her a great, great debt for it. [Applause].
— (John Jacob) Our next audio clip is a recollection by Marvin Israel of Arbus coming to Harper’s Bazaar and with her “Eccentrics” story. Israel had studied with Joseph Alpers and Alexey Brodovitch and taught design and painting at Parsons School of Design. At Harper’s he was known for his innovation with photography. His assistant, Ruth Ansel said with Marvin, you never just ran a beautiful portfolio or extraordinary beautiful women retouched; you also ran a Diane Arbus portfolio with strange people who tattooed their bodies and lived on the Bowery to have a counterbalance. After Esquire declined the story on eccentrics, Israel published it in the November, 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar under the title “The Full Circle.”
— (Marvin Israel) Listening to Harold, I realized both at Harper’s Bazaar are sort of like another country. ` I think that Esquire is a very American country. Bazaar was really like something about France or Germany. I mean, it just had all of its devotions were to elegance and taste and it the continuance of the wonderful life, the exquisite thought.
A fashion magazine is a photography magazine. A photography magazine has to begin to understand its relationship to photography. So that was a rather thrilling period. And so in came, to abbreviate this whole litany, in came Diane who was, as I realize now, a rare, I mean, it’s hard to think of her as a secretive person or a person who had the nature of being very politic. And being able to say to someone something that you might not say to another person.
So in came Diane with these photographs. I had never, and people refer to her work, and she came in with “The Eccentrics.” And that was after Harold left [unintelligible], what’s going on here.
So I mean, I just thought they were super. It was this kind of magical world that Diane considered her or began to consider her private – yeah, it was like an animal preserve. So anyway, we published those photographs and her writing. And I really only heard from her that that, how Esquire, they just can’t make it anymore.
So that was a terrific challenge to me. And I said, “Oh, well we can make it.” And the interesting thing is that we were so naïve in the art department. They were sophisticated. I wouldn’t ask her whether she had a release or not. Diane didn’t really [unintelligible with editors. I think she did with Harold. I think they had a kind of, they admired each other’s heads, in a way.
But generally the problem for a photographer, not only Diane, but say Frank or Friedlander, was the fact that their minds [unintelligible] were way beyond what any magazine could produce. And it was therefore the exquisite privilege in working with them was to kind, to force the issue on the magazine and make them publish. It was literally the end of a particular era in which the visual domination of the magazine had given up the possibility that it was to continue that tradition.
— (John Jacob) When Marvin Israel was fired from Harper’s Bazaar in 1963 after a falling out with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, the position as filled by the creative team of Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler. Feitler was a former student of Israel’s and throughout the 1960s she continued to refer assignments to Arbus, there none were as artistically ambitious as “The Full Circle.”
In 1970 she would be among the four purchasers of A Box of Ten Photographs from Arbus. I’ve asked Neil Selkirk, who began his career as a magazine photographer, to speak about the role of picture editors and art directors in supporting artists such as Arbus during the decline of the magazine era as described by Marvin Israel.
— (Neil Selkirk) Is that my cue?
— (John Jacob) That’s your cue.
— (Neil Selkirk) Okay, this is going to be short and I’m going to read it, because I don't want to miss anything. It was an extraordinary time. Up, up, up – it’s worth re-emphasizing that when Diane was working for these magazines, she was dealing directly with the editor or the art director. There was no picture editor. The art director, usually in consultation with the editor, made the decisions as to what the magazine was going to look like and who he or she was going to hire to achieve that end. It was thus that for a brief period magazines had no real budgetary concerns and a handful of brilliant art directors had an unimaginably free hand with what went onto the pages.
Diane had been the beneficiary of this system until the system strangled under her. As Harold and Marvin had just indicated, this era of editorial freedom was ending. TV was eating into advertising revenue and management was responding. Harold was outraged when Esquire’s management insisted that he include service pieces, give towards pleasing advertisers in the editorial mix. He fought them, he lost, and he walked out.
Richard Weigand, who with Jean Paul Goude had followed Benton at Esquire’s art director – as Esquire’s art director – was fired when it became apparent that they had begun directing the magazine from the art department. Management, through compliant editors, took control of art departments by hiring picture editors who essentially became management’s spies and enforcers in the art department. They delivered pre-vetted imagery for the art director to lay out. Fiercely independent photographers, like fiercely independent editors, were becoming much less welcome, much less welcome, in the world of magazines.
Diane’s two Guggenheim fellowships were incredibly important in getting her through this time, which also coincided with the beginning of explosive growth in the field of photographic education and thus in teaching gigs for photographers in need of cash, and a simultaneous expansion of interest in the medium at museums.
— (John Jacob) In 1963 Arbus was awarded a fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation for her proposal entitled “American Rites, Manners, and Customs.” The Guggenheim was among the most prestigious of fellowships available to artists and one of the few to support projects by photographers. Arbus’ fellowship was renewed by the foundation in 1966 providing her with a period of sustained support beyond magazine work. I’ve asked Jeff Rosenheim to speak about the role of the Guggenheim Foundation in American photography of this period and also about the role played by the photographer Walker Evans in helping to secure the fellowship for Arbus.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Thank you, John. It’s a really interesting project to think about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim was begun in 1925, or at least the support of artists, and they supported writers as well, and historians, and photographers. Just a little bit of background. I was surprised to learn that there were 24 artists that received Guggenheim support working with the camera before Arbus. So she’s number 25. She applied in 1962.
The first artist, we might be able to guess, actually was Edward Weston in 1937. He received renewals in ’38 and in following years as well. Evans received his Guggenheim in 1940 and he was supposed to go down south to continue his work documenting with the 8 X 10 in the primarily rural south. But he had an emergency appendicitis and couldn’t leave New York and schlep the big 8 X 10. And he actually executed those great subway pictures with the Guggenheim support, even though it was not his project.
But the other artists, and just a quick one-through – Evans in 1940 and ’41, and then again in ’59. Lang in ’41. Wright Morris in ’42, as well as in ’46 and ’54. Brett Weston in 1945, also Jack Delano. Roy DeCarava in 1952, and others. The great Robert Frank project and Sarah Grano’s [phonetic] magnificent show that looked at the Americans, I hope you all saw. Helen Levitt in 1960, Lee Friedlander in 1960 – excuse me, Helen Levitt in 1959 and in 1960; Friedlander in 1960, and interestingly, John Szarkowski in 1961. He had already received one in 1954.
And when we think about Arbus applying in 1962, we have to recall that John Szarkowski became the curator of photographs in the middle of 1962. But Arbus’ advocates included Walker Evans, and Evans was very involved in the project. Szarkowski was on his Guggenheim, and I just want to put that into that little bit of context. But getting a Guggenheim was establishing a relationship between Arbus and all of those other peers.
— (John Jacob) Szarkowski would become one of Arbus’ most enduring and influential champions. He acquired seven prints for the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department in 1964, the first photographs by her to enter a museum collection, two of which he exhibited the following year in Recent Acquisitions, Photography. In 1977 MOMA presented Arbus, together with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in the landmark exhibition “New Documents.” ’67, what did I say? Too many dates.
Our next audio clip is Marvin Israel, again, and I apologize for the audio, quality of the Marvin Israel recording. Here Marvin speaks about the transition Arbus was making from the magazine page to the museum wall. He refers to the former as a very tender way to see your work because there is in it a relationship to the world. On the museum wall, by contrast, he says the work becomes totally locked. It has no human air around it.
— (Marvin Israel) I was a good friend of Diane’s and I designed things for her and we worked on projects together. And I did the book on her and shows on her and helped her design her portfolio. There were all these things that were immensely personal to her own capacity of seeing and doing. The exhibit at the Modern where Friedlander, Winogrand, and artists began to have some public persona.
Diane was absolutely horrified because all the works that she had done, she had understood really in terms of a magazine, which is a very tender way to see your own work. It’s not so beautifully printed, but it’s in a relationship to a world with context. You turn a page, there’s some story about one thing, you turn, and then finally there I am, there I am in this magazine. On a wall, it’s somewhat horrifying. Your imagery becomes totally locked. It has really no human air around it.
— (John Jacob) I’ve asked Jeff to speak also about the emergence of the museum photography department and the market, in relation to the market photography. In the slide show we saw, we heard Arbus say you know what Carnel [phonetic] said about me, about me being a museum photographer? I hate that. Jeff, what was lost and/or gained by the photographers in the transition to the museum?
— (Jeff Rosenheim) It’s a really good question, and I’m not quite sure what Diane meant, so I’m just going to give you an impression. But when the pictures are in a magazine, the viewer controls the time and the relationship between looking at one picture and another. They can go backwards and forwards. But in the museum, when they’re on the wall, the previous slide that showed them fixed in the “New Documents” show, they can’t move around; you’re stuck, and they’re in another order.
And that is perhaps stifling to some. It creates a different kind of narrative – a magazine does as well. But what I wanted to think about here a little bit was what it meant for an artist like Arbus to be in a museum, which is, it’s not just being surrounded by photographers; you’re being, you’re in the company of the history of art. Certainly at the Met, but at the Modern, the history of contemporary art.
But when, in thinking about this, I wanted to understand where at least we were when this crazy picture that Neil made of us, was. That was 1992 and I was, I seemed, I don't know if I feel like I seem tall or small, but it was a funny moment. And I will say this, that I thought about where Arbus fits in. We acquired at the Met the first of our pictures in 1969. That’s sort of late considering that MOMA had already shown the work in 1967 and she had been working for so long a period of time. But the Met’s collection is very different from the Modern’s collection and we can talk about that maybe in conversation.
But mostly we acquired at the Modern, excuse me, at the Met, acquisitions of photography by gift. And it’s very interesting to think about what our first purchases were of living artists. And it really wasn’t until the 1950s, and it just worked very differently. But we can talk about that, I hope, because I have some pretty interesting analysis and I look forward to that conversation.
— (John Jacob) John Szarkowski said Arbus was not at all eager to exhibit her work. The time required to make the prints was an interruption and she was wary of the attention and the attended distraction that exhibitions would bring. Moreover, he said, Arbus was quite conscious of the fact that what she was doing was quite different from what other photographers were doing and she wanted a chance to complete it before getting it out in public.
With magazine work declining, Arbus saw print sales as a potential source of income, but not a stable one. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum acquired two prints from Arbus for $75 dollars each. That year too the Smithsonian Institution purchased five prints for a total of $125 dollars. Jean-Claude Lemagny, curator at the Bibliothèque National de France requested 25 prints asking Arbus to accept $20 to $30 dollars each, rather than her usual price of $100 dollars per print. I’ve asked Jeffrey Fraenkel to speak about Lemagny’s correspondence with Arbus as exemplifying her financial and artistic struggle during this period.
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) So I wanted to share with you these letters that I first saw when I was 23. I was in Paris on other, for other reasons. Went by the Bibliothèque National, met the curator, Jean-Claude Lemagny. He was very open about sharing his collection. I’d asked to see some 19th century things and he said, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?” And I said, “Do you have anything by Diane Arbus?”
He pulled out the prints, showed me the 20 prints and then said, “Let me show you this correspondence.” And it made a powerful impression on me. And it really is a way of sort of setting the wayback machine and going back to this period just prior, a few years prior to the moment when museums started taking photography really seriously.
So Jean-Claude Lemagny wrote Arbus May 31st, 1969 and I’m going to read you a very edited versions even of the highlighted parts. Lemagny says, “as a keeper of the Cabinete del Estampe of the French National Library, in charge of the collection of photographs, have the task of increasing this collection. This year particularly we want to contact American photographers. Unfortunately, our grant for this program is not very large. We cannot purchase your – we cannot purchase photographic prints at their real price. Therefore, I must rely on your liberality and ask you whether you would let us have your prints rather cheap, it if is possible.” [Laughter]
“I should like about 20 prints,” and then he suggests some sizes. So she writes back, next John? And I wanted you to see the actual handwriting and her typewriter. Even the typewriting is idiosyncratic and has its own charm, I would say. So one month later she responds, “Thanks for your nice letter. It made me glad.
And John McKendry, who was at the Met, spoke well of you to me. The trouble is I’m swamped with work and pressed for money. When I spend the day in the darkroom, I don't photograph. Let us do it more gradually. What if we start with five prints? I usually get” - $400 dollars for a print – I’m sorry, “$100 dollars for a print.” And that’s, she hopefully gets $100 dollars for a print. “Tell me what you can pay and give me time.”
So one month later, July 27th, Lemagny writes, “Alas, there is worse the problem, the price. I understand that $100 dollars is a normal price. In France also we fight to achieve legitimate prices for good photographs. But $100 dollars is too much for our ridiculous little dwarfish budget. Our maximum possibilities would be $20 dollars or $30 dollars around for a photograph, no more.” Next? Next?
So Arbus writes back on October 4th, “Please try to make it $750 dollars for the 20 prints. That’s $37.50 for a print, and I will do it. And I would like to make all prints 16 by 20 inches. I am really pleased at the opportunity.” Next? Lemagny writes back, “I understood that $100 dollars for a 16 by 20 inch print is a very normal price. I understand also that $750 dollars for 20 prints is a reduction of more than 60 percent, a very, very important reduction. But it is completely impossible for us to give $750 dollars to one photographer, so I propose that we purchase ten prints for $375 dollars. If you could donate some more, I bless you.” [Laughter]
“In the future we’ll purchase more to increase your portfolio in the B.N.” Okay, so next, October 25th, she writes back, “something good has happened for us. I have to print for a collector in a museum here. So while I am doing that, I will make your prints, the 20 you wanted for the $600 dollars you suggested in the first place. So I will proceed according to your original instructions and send them to Mr. Moraseur.” Okay.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) I think she was printing for the Met. I think she was printing for the Met. I’m guessing because it’s from the same address and it’s exactly the same time. She’s saying I’m doing that. I will make your prints. But she says –
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) Have to print for a collector at a museum here. Oh, a museum here, could be. Yeah. So October 25th, next please, Lemagny writes back, “We are lucky. I agree with you for 20 prints at $600 dollars. Of course if you could donate some more [laughter], I’ll pray the good Lord for you during all my life.” [laughter] And then this is the part that just must have been, it must – it’s a story that is a true one and we’ve all heard it over and over, and it’s true and it still must have been a bit galling for Arbus. “Our government cut out our budget for 1969, but in January 1970, we have a new one, so I would prefer that you put a date like the January 2nd, 1970, on your invoice. Otherwise, I’m afraid you must do the invoices four copies again. Of course, I’ll acknowledge the receipt of your prints.” Next?
So this is not dated, but it’s sometime in November. And it’s six months after the start of the correspondence. She simply writes a letter that says “here are the photographs I promised you,” and goes into a few other details. Next? November 26th, 1969. Lemagny’s response, “I’ve just received your beautiful prints. That was a great pleasure for my colleagues and I too admire them since our public, soon our public will do the same. I saw in a magazine that Lisette Model was your teacher. Do you think it’s possible to ask her prints? [Laughter] Could you write me her address, please? I’ll give your invoice to the housekeeping department, the French administration pays slowly, but surely.” December 3rd, next?
Arbus writes, “Yes, Lisette was my teacher and is my friend. Her address is this. But I would suggest that you propose more money to her for fewer prints because she can be quite fierce and her work is wonderful and she does not support herself doing commercial work like the rest of us do. I wish also that you could urge your government to be speedier than usual in paying me because I must move in February and I can foresee that my reserves will be sorely depleted.” Next?
So she sent him the prints. He’s promised the funds. She’s waiting for the money. January 30th, “I’ve moved marvelously near the Hudson River. Gulls, helicopters, tugboats, tankers out my window. The money would be opportune.” February 26th, next. Lemagny writes, “I tried to urge our housekeeping, but the difficulties of changing budget of 1969 in 1970 delayed all. So you will be paid at the end of March or beginning of April. I’m sorry, but impossible to do more.” Next?
She writes back on March 14th, “Oh, please make them hurry. I had counted on it and I really need it soon. Thanks for everything. Urge them to send it by the end of March.” Next? April 3rd, “I am so sorry about all of these delays and difficulties. I returned to speak to my colleagues at the housekeeping, but I was obliged.”
I mean, it’s almost painful to read this. “I think they did not inform me very accurately in the beginning, but we must excuse them too because it is difficult for them to know because the papers make so complicated journey across so many sleepy and drowsy offices of France and America. I beg your pardon for the delays and all. I hope you do not bear me a grudge.” Okay. Next one, last one, undated, sometime in April or May, one year since the beginning of the correspondence. “Don't worry, it has come and everything is fine.”
— (John Jacob) Perhaps not surprisingly in late 1969 Arbus began to think about developing a portfolio of her prints. She had not managed to achieve $100 dollars per print, and now eventually over the course of her thinking, she would ultimately would come up with A Box of Ten Photographs and charge $1,000 dollars for it. The idea was suggested by Marvin Israel, but portfolios were already gaining some currency among photographers and collectors. Given Arbus’ perilous financial situation and her frustration with anything that kept her from picture making, it’s surprising that she undertook the fabrication of her own portfolio.
As she originally conceived it, she wrote to Allan Arbus, it would be a simple box of, quote, “eight or so prints, actual photographic prints,” unquote, whose making she would supervise, but not do herself. The pictures, she said, will, quote, “be the ones that have been shown, like the twins, Xmas, et cetera, no text, except maybe a paragraph by me, an addition of 100 or two selling for, I don't know, four or five hundred dollars or three. It will be a business proposition, but pristine. I mean, it’ll be like an addition of etchings or lithographs.” I’ve asked Jeff to speak again, so quickly, about the emergency of the portfolio or the brief emergence of the portfolio as an economic alternative to magazine work within the nascent photography market.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Sure. The photographers that were emerging at this time realized that they could actually curate their own little museums in these boxes. That they could create something in between the museum wall and the magazine spread, and the portfolio is that kind of thing. And Arbus’ box, which we’ll hear more about which is brilliantly shown upstairs – John, the exhibition is really superb and the elegance of the design and its emotional quality has really hit me, so you’re in for a real treat. But those portfolios were actually done by the photographers. They were not really published in the traditional sense.
So Friedlander and Walker Evans and in fact Friedlander does Evans. And Diane did her own. And this little community of mostly New York-based artists were working within their own framework. And it led to a market, it led to the beginning of a collectible field. And yes, there were historical etching and other lithographic printing portfolios, but it was really right at the end of the ‘60s and beginning of the ‘70s that the market happened.
And I’ve got to believe that it was also the resurrection of an interest in artists who had emerged previously, people like Lartigue that were being published in magazines like Harper’s, and artists like Evans who people thought were already dead in the ‘70s, and those portfolios were among the first things that entered the consciousness of a new marketplace.
— (John Jacob) Arbus met with Peter Bunnell, then a curator in MOMA’s photography department, and he helped prepare a list of potential buyers for the portfolio. In a recent phone conversation with Bunnell, he identified two key motivations for making the portfolio as income and the establishment of a stable artistic identity. Bunnell said, “Arbus never coveted the idea of printing, but she was an expert printmaker. For some photographers of the time, there was a tension between a total commitment to the print and a view of the photograph as a kind of window, as a view onto the world. That’s where the idea of the box comes in. It conceals nothing.”
After “New Documents,” Diane Arbus was disillusioned by imitators. So it was an economic issue – sorry, but also one of what I’d call identity. The key motivations for the portfolio were sales, income, and to establish a stable stylistic identity. Jeffrey, what do you think is meant by a stable stylistic identity?
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) We were talking at lunch earlier today about how the choice of pictures would define in a certain way to the people who would theoretically be buying it, who she was. A different choice of pictures would have meant a different stylistic identity. I think the fact that we’re here talking about it almost 50 years later shows that she, this ten which people ask all of us all the time, why isn’t this picture in it, why isn’t that picture in it?
If you look in the show at her practice sheet, which is in the collection of the Met, you will see her toying with ideas about which pictures are going to go in the show in the box. Even why – she’s asking herself why am I making this, and practicing her handwriting. I would say as we all now know now, portfolios for Arbus and for others were a labor of love. They didn’t really make anybody any money. At best they established some sort of a stable stylistic identity that was dispersed into the world.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Well, self-publishing is the establishment of some sort of stable identity .I would say that this clear box is very interesting because it served both as – and no other artist had this in those that we’ve mentioned. It served both as the storage container, and the exhibition frame. It was brilliantly conceived, but you could only look at one picture at a time. It avoided the problem of those pictures being fixed on the wall and you could rotate your pictures through and delight yourself. And I think she must have just loved that idea. I do.
— (John Gossage) As a photographer who did a portfolio, is that on? Sorry. As a photographer that did a portfolio a few years later than that and talked to a number of people, one thing I will add is that one of the reasons we did it, too, is to set a context for which our work could be seen is. In the early days, the museum practice and scholarship and the history of the medium, you often felt that the medium was particularly lax in its standards and seriousness of who it let in.
And if you felt, egotistically or validly, that your concerns were of a bit more gravity than what the medium presented, you wanted to set a context for it. Your portfolio has allowed that to happen, as well as the economic thing, which often didn’t work very well, as you say. But it was like this is the context I work, and not in that big field of so much noise. And I think Arbus particularly felt that strongly, too, of her own context being particularly rigorous.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) I think that’s right, John. I should say, and I may be wrong, there are many museum people here, but the museum field has never looked kindly on portfolios. And if you notice, she didn’t sell any of her portfolios to any institution – they eventually got there. And I would say that’s the same for Lee and for many of the other artists. Walker Evans, I had to actually beg Lee Friedlander to give us the Walker Evans portfolio that he printed. No one – it never entered the museum’s collection.
— (John Jacob) I’ve asked Neil to speak about Arbus’ printing methods for the portfolio in relation to this idea of establishing a stable stylistic identity.
— (Neil Selkirk) So there’s this huge quandary. On the one hand, Diane took, and there’s countless references and revelations and so on, to her thinking, believing, about taking someone’s photograph. That what mattered was meeting them. The second thing was having the photograph as a memento. And the third and last thing was the print. On the other hand, no one was more bananas than her about the print, in fact. She would say, she would say in the class, “the prints aren’t really that important – don't touch.” [Laughter]
You know, so she started out like everybody else printing with a masking frame, which is sort of metal leaves that make the hard edge around the photograph. And then, this was when she was doing 35 mostly, but then she switched to two and a quarter. And unbeknownst to an awful lot of people, everybody says oh, she worked with a Rolleiflex. Well, mostly she started with a Rolleiflex, but mostly she used a Mamiyaflex.
And unbeknownst to almost everyone on the planet except you today, the Mamiyaflex and the Rolleiflex pictures were very, the negatives, were very different in size. They’re both called two and a quarter, they’re both called six by six centimeters. In fact, there’s something like – there may be almost an eighth of an inch difference in size.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Totally different [laughter].
— (Neil Selkirk) Well, the point was that if she printed, which she wasn’t yet, if she had printed a Mamiyaflex negative in the negative carrier for an Omega D-2 enlarger, which she used, she could print the whole negative. Because the cutout between the two sandwiches of aluminum that held the negative was big enough to print the whole Mamiya neg. But she didn’t have a Mamiya at this point, she had a Rolleiflex which was huge. The negs were much bigger.
So what do you do? I’ve just probably, Allan did actually, but you get a file and you go [reh, reh, reh] and open up the hole. And of course, the hole isn’t going to get big enough until it’s too big. And that means you’re going to get a black edge around it when you don't mask it in the masking frame. And incredibly it seems that Diane was pretty much the first person to go, “wow, that’s nice, and I’m going to print my pictures like that.” And so starting in - thank you - starting in I guess probably by ’64 she was printing with a big black border. Am I right about that? Karan, what do you think?
— (Karan Rinaldo) ’65.
— (Neil Selkirk) Okay, ’65. Sorry. No, this is great. And so that’s how they happened. And you can see the – oh, you can’t see them all. You see this –
— (Karan Rinaldo) ’67 [inaudible].
— (Neil Selkirk) Well, okay. Anyway, that’s sort of where the file didn’t hit into the corner. And in fact, there’s something quite interesting about this one. That there are much bigger notches out of that neg carrier. But within, in no time flat and certainly by the time I did a class, which I guess was 1970, she was just livid that everybody was printing with black borders, [laughter], and I mean, she was determined to try to do something about it. So then what she did is she cut little bits of cardboard from the box - there’s a long story about this – from the box that the glossy negatives were in. It’s cheap cardboard that had sort of furry edges. When you cut it, it tore.
And it made, and she took two pieces of cardboard about this long with a little piece of tape on each end and nudged them in so that the picture just, actually yeah, you can see at the top. There’s an incredibly faint black line at the top. Most of them evidenced more of it. You can even see it here, sort of. So when you see the other box of ten pictures, you’ll see that there’s much more vestigial edge to it. And she started doing this when she started doing the portfolio. In fact, it was done for the portfolio, for the box of ten.
And the reason when you see Arbus pictures all over the place in all the books is when we started to print them in I guess the early ‘70s, posthumously, we decided that we would be, we would honor the printing, the border technique that she used at the time immediately prior to her death for all the prints. So all subsequent prints were made like that. Thank you.
— (John Jacob) Not to rush anyone.
— (Neil Selkirk) Aren’t we supposed to talk about the prints?
— (John Jacob) Up, here you go.
— (Neil Selkirk) Okay, just a little bit more about obsession, just so you know how obsessive it was. Starting with film, Diane used, initially she used a German film called ADOX KB14 or KB17, which was a gorgeous, gorgeous super-rich film. ADOX went out of business in Germany in the late ‘60s. Then she started using Agfa, Isopan, IF, IFF – Agfa, Isopan, IF, which was a 50 ASA, very fine grain film, beautiful, beautiful film. Then Agfa stopped importing it into the United States.
So Diane called around everybody she knew, she called around Avedon Studio, she called me and said, “what am I going to do, what films can I use?” We all made our suggestions. She tried – this is the United States in 1971. There isn’t a single film, and she’s tried them all, that is good enough that will make her the prints she wants. So she gets Marvin Israel’s gallery, Brisba [phonetic] Gallery, which I think was in Hanover – I think it was Hanover – to mail her into the United States the film that she was going to use, the Agfa film.
The chemistry she used to develop, nothing came in yellow packets from Kodak. Everything sort of came from the New York chemical company in little jars. She mixed everything from both the negative development and the print development was all mixed from raw chemicals.
— (John Gossage) A funny thing. I found, actually, two days ago the formula she wrote out for me. And she told me she got it from the old press photographers who shot flash pictures, and they would blow out all the highlights. And if you’re using a fine grain film, this two solution developer, basically going back to the older photographers and asking them what did they use before everything was packaged up? And that’s where, that’s where she got some of this technique from.
— (Neil Selkirk) The developer is called a compensating developer. And the fantastic thing about the compensating developers is you can get the exposure totally wrong, and get a beautiful print. And that was critical to, once you’ve seen her contact prints, that you can basically push the button and something great is going to come out. I think I’ve finished.
— (John Jacob) In 1970 Arbus was introduced to Philip Leider, a co-founder of Art Forum magazine. Founded in 1962, Art Forum had grown into an important champion of late modernist painting and sculpture. Leider was unsure if there was any place for photography in a serious art magazine. A meeting was scheduled at Arbus’ apartment to look at the portfolio and Leider, thrilled by what he saw, committed on the spot to publishing it.
Five photographs by Diane Arbus appeared in the May, 1970 issue of Art Forum, accompanied by a short text by Arbus. A sixth photograph was featured on the cover. Leider later wrote, “It seemed to me, it then seemed to me that any definition of art that did not include such a body of work was fatally flawed. With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer deny its status as art. What changed everything was the portfolio itself.” In this third magazine spread by Arbus, we begin to see the emergence of the stable stylistic identity spoken of by Peter Bunnell earlier. Considered retrospectively, I think we also begin to see the emergence of an Arbus canon that would be solidified by her death.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) It’s kind of perfect the Art Forum is the shape of her format, which makes the pictures look so big and beautiful.
— (John Jacob) In June, Art Forum ran a full page ad with instructions on how to purchase the portfolio directly from Arbus. She wrote to Allan Arbus, “I had a call from some art dealer to say that Jasper Johns wanted to buy a box. How terrific. First one who doesn’t know me.” In the margin of the letter she added, “Four are sold, two and a half paid for. The owners are out of Who’s Who. My confidence is absurdly on a roller coaster.” I spoke with Mr. Johns about his acquisition about of A Box of Ten Photographs from Arbus, asking first how he came to meet her.
— (Jasper Johns) Actually, I don't know when I met her and I don't know that I had met her when, as far as I know, I hadn’t met her when I acquired the photographs. But it’s possible that I met her, because I saw the ad for the box in Art Forum and was quite taken and immediately wanted to acquire it. And I asked, and I felt I didn’t know who she was, but, well anyway, she had not registered on my mind as a name. So we ordered the box and Arbus had to print the photographs.
And some time later she came over to my studio on Houston Street with the photographs. I know that when she came into my studio with the box, I was working on a very large painting of a map of the world based on a Fuller, a Bucky Fuller map. She said, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that, get in there and do things.” Of course, I was wishing I could do what –
— (Jeff Rosenheim) What she did.
— (John Jacob) So what was it that attracted you about the photographs?
— (Jasper Johns) Well, the photographs attracted me to the photographs.
— (John Jacob) The photographs themselves.
— (Jasper Johns) I can’t say anything.
— (John Jacob) Yeah, yeah.
— (Jasper Johns) I can tell you that when I, this might amuse you, that I was so pleased with them and I had a visit from John Cage and I wanted John to look at them. And I handed the whole box to him and he sat on the sofa and went through them. And after, he didn’t say anything for the whole time until after he had looked at all of them. Then he turned and he said, “There’s just one thing about them.” And I said, “What is that, John?” He said, “They’re so awful.” [Laughter]. “Sorry that she wasn’t able to finish the addition she had in mind.
— (John Jacob) Yeah.
— (Jasper John) But that’s life.
— (John Jacob) Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26th, 1971. In his obituary written for The Village Voice, Alan Coleman quoted from Arbus’ test for Art Forum, and described her work as a sort of contemporary anthropology reminiscent of the work of August Sander. In 2018 an obituary was published in The New York Times as part of its new project titled “Overlooked,” recalling the accomplishments of women that it had failed to note earlier. If “New Documents” had introduced Arbus along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand as examples of a new paradigm for photography within a museum setting, it was the publication of A Box of Ten Photographs in Art Forum that broke through the wall separating art from photography.
In 1972 in an exhibition curated for the National Collection of Fine Arts by Walter Hopps, Diane Arbus became the first artist to be represented at the Venice Biennale by her photographs, an honor undoubtedly related to her publication in Art Forum as a modernist artist. The portfolio was sent to represent her.
On encountering the portfolio in Venice, New York Times art writer Hilton Kramer became an important champion of Arbus’ work. What may be regarded as the first chapter in this posthumous fame, at least as far as exhibitions go, he wrote, “is to be found in Venice where a portfolio of ten enormous photographs has proved to be the overwhelming sensation of the American pavilion. If one’s natural tendency is to be skeptical about a legend, it must be said that all suspicion vanishes in the presence of the Arbus work, which is extremely powerful and very strange.”
The last of the four magazine spreads we’ll see tonight appeared posthumously as a remembrance by Doon Arbus. Her article, “Diane Arbus, Photographer” was published in the October issue of Ms magazine where Bea Feitler had recently become art director. Oops, I haven't gone forward. Sorry. Tell me next time I do that. It was accompanied by seven of the photographs included in A Box of Ten Photographs and was the only publication ever to include Arbus’ photographs reproduced together with her handwritten captions for the portfolio.
We’ll conclude tonight’s presentation with a review of what research for this exhibition has uncovered about the fate of A Box of Ten Photographs after which I’d like to open the panel to questions. Arbus completed printing for eight known portfolios, but had not signed or prepared title pages for those unsold. Four were sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by a photographer, Richard Avedon, another by Jasper Johns, a fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler.
Arbus added an eleventh print to the sets made especially for Avedon and Feitler. The remaining four sets were designated by the estate of Diane Arbus as artist’s proofs. One proof was purchased from the estate by the Fog Museum, now the Harvard Art Museum in 1972. Another was given by Arbus’ daughters, Doon and Amy Arbus, to their father, Allan Arbus.
His portfolio was purchased in 2005 by British art dealer and curator, Anthony d’Offay, from whom it was jointly acquired by the Tate Modern and National Galleries of Scotland in 2008. The remaining two artist proofs are privately held. Bea Feitler died in 1982. Her portfolio was sold at auction for the then breathtaking price of $42,900 to Baltimore based dealer J.H. Dalsheimer. The Smithsonian American Art Museum purchased the portfolio from Dalsheimer in 1986. Richard Avedon died in 2004.
Andrew and Mary Pilara, founders of Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, purchased his portfolio from the Richard Avedon Foundation in 2005. The portfolio given by Avedon to Mike Nichols and the one sold to Jasper Johns remain in private hands. In late 1972 or ’73 under the auspices of the estate of Diane Arbus, Neil Selkirk began printing to complete Arbus’ intended edition of 50. By 1979, virtually all of the posthumous portfolios had been purchased.
Based on the edition numbers of individual prints that have appeared at auction, it appears that at least 15 posthumous portfolios have since been broken up and the prints sold separately. Thus, of Arbus’ proposed edition of 50, significantly fewer remain in the form she intended.
So I’d like to open the panel to questions, but I’m going to ask a leading question of my own as the first question. And he doesn’t know that this question is coming at him, but Neil, in a brilliant piece of public relations writing that you recently shared with me, you wrote “the story of Diane Arbus, A Box of Ten Photographs, is the fulcrum upon which the history of photography forever changed course. Once you’ve read this book or seen the exhibition, you realize that it’s about ten pictures that changed the world and the fascinating adventure story of how that came about.” Neil, would you elaborate on this, particularly in relation to the other iconic bodies of American photography such as Robert Frank’s, The Americans?
— (Neil Selkirk) Well, I just found out what the word ‘hyperbole’ meant. [Laughter] That was a contrivance to John. I can’t remember what motivated it, but it’s, I mean, I think, I mean, you established it with everything that you’ve done for this show. Is you’ve laid out – I mean, we’ve seen it today that this, before this, photography was at best a backwater – you know, teeny, teeny, tiny. Ten years later it was enormous, and it’s what it is, it’s become what it is. And I mean, the fulcrum, yeah. I would stand by that. I mean Robert Frank, The Americans, you know, I found out something really interesting about this. That Robert Frank published The Americans in ’59 in Europe, or ’58.
— (John Gossage) ’58.
— (Neil Selkirk) ’58 in Europe, ’59 in the United States. But it wasn’t re-exhibited until 1976, I think, in the United States. So it was after Arbus that Frank, it was shown once at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959, I think, or 1960.
— (John Gossage) Not entirely.
— (Neil Selkirk) Not the whole lot.
— (John Gossage) There’s an expert in the room, but I don't know where she is. Where is she? She was here. No, it was never shown entirely, I think, until relatively recently.
— (Neil Selkirk) Right. But I mean, in other words there was a show which reflected the book.
— (John Gossage) It was a gallery show of all the works from the Lunn Collection, I think is the ’79 show.
— (Sarah) No, there was a [inaudible]
— (Neil Selkirk) There she is. There she is.
— (Sarah) There was a show in 1962 at MOMA.
— (John Jacob) Can you hand her the microphone, please? And then Philadelphia, right Sarah? But that wasn’t complete, either. Hold on. We have an expert in the room.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) New microphone.
— (Sarah) There was a show, excuse me, in 1962 at the Museum of Modern Art that included a number of American prints. And then there was a show at the Philadelphia Museum in 1969 that included a large number of American prints and that traveled around the country.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) I think the MOMA show in ’62 was with Callahan?
— (Sarah) Yes, it was with Callahan.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) It wasn’t his own show, even.
— (Neil Selkirk) So I was dead wrong, but I read it somewhere.
— (John Gossage) Well, one of the clear differences between the Robert Frank work and the Arbus portfolio is that it took many years for the Robert Frank work to reach out and really change things. And when the book came out, I mean, I bought it, remaindered for $8 dollars that you couldn’t give it away in the ‘60s.
I remember when the portfolio came out in Art Forum, a number of my painter friends, I remember one of them said to me, “are there more photographers like this?” I mean, I said, “no.” He said, “Well, I guess one is good enough to make it a really serious art then.” I mean, the impact was immediate. And both American Photographs by Walker Evans and The Americans took a long time to really gain traction, it would seem.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) I don't think American Photographs, which was MOMA’s great book from 1938, which includes 87 pictures, really found its audience until it was republished in the ‘60s when things started again. And that itself took a long time. Just a little tidbit. The Met started getting Evans prints in the collection as of 1950, but we did not acquire, purchase from Evans a picture until my time at the museum, which as in ’88, which is incredible to me.
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) You purchased it from Evans directly?
— (Jeff Rosenheim) No, what I’m saying is that we didn’t buy Evans, which is kind of crazy. It was MOMA, MOMA was supporting them all along and MOMA was supporting Diane.
— (John Jacob) Karan? I probably am not alone in the room in wanting to hear more about what’s going on at the Arbus archive, and what do you do from day to day there and have you made any discoveries? [Laughter]
— (Karan Rinaldo) Well, day to day these days I’m doing a little bit of other work, so I can give you an idea of day to day when I was in the thick of it. My favorite day to day is spending the time cataloguing the rolls of film where I’m looking at the contact sheets. And one of the things that was always exciting is to identify – the estate had done an excellent job of identifying rolls of film and the frames from which the known photographs had been printed.
But I had printed a kind of a thumbnail list of all the ones that hadn’t been identified, so those were stuck in my brain as I went through the rolls of film and the contact sheets. Some days I had the days where I found one, and it was thrilling. That’s a tidbit about the day to day in the archive.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Let me underscore. Karan did an amazing thing and is still doing amazing things. But in Neil’s essay, in the Revelations catalogue, there’s something extraordinary which is this is an artist that had thousands of rolls of film which in fact she did number. But when she made prints, she never wrote the number of the roll of film on the print. So how did she actually find the roll of film when she had a print she wanted to make again? And Neil has a lovely story telling about this, which is that should did not write that down on the backs of the prints. So this is what Karan is talking about, in a certain sense.
— (Neil Selkirk) Yeah, it’s unimaginable how she found them. I mean, 7,000 rolls of film. I mean, it actually suggests that she didn’t – excuse me – delve deeply backwards printing very often. She was probably mostly printing things that were relatively recent, or that she had a handle on where they were.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Yeah, I agree.
— (John Jacob) We should take a question from the audience.
— (Zohar) Well, thank you first for this event. I’m Zohar, I’m a filmmaker who’s always been fascinated by artists who’s mindset is completely different from anybody else in their milieu. So obviously she’s one. But my question is about a picture with Eddie the giant. More background about that.
— (Neil Selkirk) Background about the picture?
— (Zohar) Yes, if people know more about the context or about that photo.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) If I heard correctly, Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant?
— (Zohar) Yes.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Well, again, I refer you to some of the books that we have all worked on. But it’s interesting to me that she first photographed Carmel ten years before the picture we showed tonight. That 1960 version is actually in the same home with the same parents, but the picture doesn’t really work. When I get to talk about Arbus, I like to think about that that level of patience is atypical for the medium of photography, where time has to be pretty quick. And this is an artist that knew she did not evidently have the picture and ten years later, she did. That’s extraordinary to me. So that’s a little tidbit.
— (Zohar) Thank you.
— (Male Speaker) One of the impressions that I came away with from the discussion so far is that Arbus had a clearly expressed preference for magazines, maybe portfolios in the middle, and museums as the least preferred display medium. I would guess that some of that is about compensation, but I wondered to what extent you might think that it has anything to do with sequencing, that is the ability to control what order people see things in, and distractions, the ability to have a focused viewpoint.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Are you asking a specific –
— (Male Speaker) Because I can’t remember who in particular talked about that preference. I’m asking the panel, but feel free to weigh.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) That’s because we brought together the living and the dead.
— (John Gossage) I have a question on the archive, guys. Do almost of her portfolios, her major published portfolios, also include at least some of her writing? I know that some of them have extensive, but at least caption-wise and everything?
— (Karan Rinaldo) You mean the magazine pieces?
— (John Gossage) Yeah, the magazine things.
— (Karan Rinaldo) No, a handful of them do, I would say yeah, but certainly not all of them. And a lot of them are individual photographs that were published in magazines.
— (John Gossage) Sort of meant the portfolios more than anything, yeah. Because one thing that allows you her also to have her eye and her voice, if you will, which is much, much harder to do.
— (Karan Rinaldo) Mhm.
— (John Gossage) Nobody likes to read a lot of stuff standing up in an institution.
— (Karan Rinaldo) Yeah, and her voice is fantastic.
— (John Gossage) Oh yeah, she’s a terrific writer.
— (Male Speaker) What I’m really asking about is whether you have the sense that it made any difference to her that in a magazine you control what order people see pictures in. In a box, you have less control, but some control in the sense of the order that it’s packed in. And in a museum, people walk in a room and look around.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) I think you’ve said it correctly. I actually would say that in the magazine space, although she was given some responsibility and did contribute writing, which very few photographers would or should ever be allowed. [Laughter]
— (Neil Selkirk) Wisely.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) But she probably was not able to exactly decide the left/right issues. I don't know that. I don't know if we have any evidence to say that she couldn’t decide which came first or last or et cetera. But I think it’s an interesting question. I think that the museum space is the most awkward space for a lot of artists, but it’s not just because the pictures are fixed on the wall and there’s a sequence. But oftentimes museums only show a single work by an artist, so they are there by themselves. And it is a one-on-one relationship and the text is minimal or is as maximal as the artist prescribes.
I think these are different spaces and that moment, and Neil has talked about, that moment of the ‘60s into the ‘70s is, with no exception, a time where magazines were reaching perhaps a larger audience of photography lovers than magazines were than museums.
— (John Gossage) One thing I asked her once, we were talking one day, and I asked her was there any body of work, any book that she would want to do of her work. And you have to understand, back then it was really, really hard to get a serious photographic book out. I mean, now everybody has a book. It was like a rarity. And the only thing she said, that she said she would like to do a book, at that point in time, on the nudist colony work.
But you know, getting a book, which gives you even more control, is the magazine format you control the sequence, you see one at a time. Often you can get a substantive number. But I think it was out of her reach practically as it as for most all of us back then. I mean, Robert Frank didn’t have another book after The Americans forever. The same thing with Walker Evans. You just, you had your one book and that was it.
— (John Jacob) Let’s go to another question.
— (Male Speaker) Thanks very much. I haven't read any of your books, so if you’ve answered this question in the books, forgive me. And maybe this is really more for the photographers who worked with her and knew her, I was wondering about her ethics of the relationship with her subjects. And I saw a note in there in the correspondence with the French museum director about a 50 year embargo maybe on some of the photographs, and whether that was a concern about, I think it was a concern about not having permission, a permission form, or consent form, that sort of thing. But what was, I guess, what was the practice of the time for photographers who were, it may have been different for magazines than for a museum environment. What were her thoughts on that, what was her attitude towards her responsibility as a photographer to her subjects in terms of how the photographs might be exhibited or used?
— (Neil Selkirk) Okay, the first thing to remember is that the photograph, this goes two ways again. The photograph isn’t the person. The photograph is something that was created, the person was sort of there and the photograph couldn’t have been made without them. So they’re completely separate entities. On the other hand – and she tried very hard to get releases from people. There are some very funny stories about that.
— (Male Speaker) Such as?
— (Neil Selkirk) Well, on one occasion she took a picture of someone, I thought, I’ve been told I’m wrong about the person. The boy with the straw hat in the parade, which is in the box, actually. I remember her saying, but it may have been a different picture, that she took the picture, cursed herself because she’s forgotten to get a release and then gets a cab home and the guy is driving the taxi. That’s the best one I’ve heard.
— (Female Speaker) That is a true story.
— (Neil Selkirk) Yeah, and I think it’s a true story.
— (Female Speaker) The man in the picture that sold that picture.
— (Neil Selkirk) Oh, is it the guy with the straw hat?
— (Female Speaker) Yes.
— (Neil Selkirk) Oh, so I was right. [laughter] Okay. So I’m not able to answer your question directly because I’ve never had this conversation with her as a sense of a direct responsibility to the subject. I know it’s an obsession with the estate. And you’re right about the 50 year thing. I wondered if anybody was going to pick up on that. That had to do with having taken pictures of nudists, I think primarily, and having no right to publicize their pictures. In fact, you saw the nudist waitress here tonight.
Three hours ago there were two pictures up there. And one of them was pulled this afternoon because the people in that picture at some point became aware of it and asked not to have it reproduced in the future. You know, so there’s a tremendous sensitivity generally to the rights of the subjects, which has been completely ignored by academics complaining about or describing them and their psychological problems based on the pictures.
— (John Gossage) I would add, we live in a very different time now.
— (Neil Selkirk) Right.
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) If releases were necessary to make pictures of people on the street, so much of her work wouldn’t exist. However, she did take it seriously and tried to get releases. And the part that you’re asking about, she wrote the curator to say “I want to include four pictures that I would ask you not to show for 50 years.” And he writes back, and says “hmm, can I ask why you wouldn’t want me to show them?” And her answer is “I’ve given you four only which are not to be exhibited, four only, which are not to be exhibited publicly according to the restrictions as marked. This is because I have no release and in these particular circumstances, I must respect the moral right of privacy for the people in the photographs.”
— (John Gossage) And also, I’d ask you to consider something, and this is opinion on my part. So this is not quotation, but knowing the person, knowing the work. And hearing her voice again for me after so many years and remembering how good a sense of humor she had. But why did this person make these pictures? What was she doing? My sense and from conversation and from things I’ve heard, it was not particularly to exhibit them, necessarily to publish them, even though publishing allowed her to make more pictures with the letters and everything. It served purposes.
But the absolute base use of it, she talks about it, having this great, like fascination and like thrill of meeting and dealing with these people. She could have just done that and not made the pictures and satisfied some of the things she talked about. You make these pictures.
I mean, I’m sort of personalizing it, but you make pictures because oddly in that 125th of a second, somehow the pictures wind up if you’re doing it right knowing more than you know at the time. They give you an extra level of what’s in front of you and what you’ve done.
Especially with Arbus’ pictures, those expressions pass so quickly and everything, they’re there and they’re gone. And you don't even – she even was describing once in the lecture here about not even knowing what she was getting when she was getting a certain picture. That’s the way it works. I think this, outside of what it’s all become, was at its base a private practice of an intensely curious individual with a great intellect. And that if, given her morals and everything, this was for her own edification, survival, understanding of the world – the same reason any of us do things that help us make our way in the world. Then all the practical things come on and things get complicated, [unintelligible] releases happen, museum shows happen. Everything happens, and more complications. But that was not what her concern was as far as I understand I t.
— (Neil Selkirk) That was really good.
— (John Gossage) Thank you. [Applause]
— (John Jacob) We are running out of time and so maybe we can take, depending on the brevity of the answers of the panelists, one or two.
— (John Gossage) Yes or no questions. [Laughter]
— (Male Speake) Did Arbus consider herself a feminist, and did her gender, was it a help, a hindrance, or not a factor at all in her work, especially in a male-dominated publishing culture?
— (Jeffrey Fraenkel) No. [Laughter]
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Yes. [Laughter]
— (Neil Selkirk) She did not consider herself a feminist.
— (Female Speaker) [Unintelligible]. If you had to choose a single photograph as to why you became interested in Diane’s work in the first place, what would it be and why?
— (John Gossage) I’ll give you one – the first photograph I saw, I think two days before I actually met her for the first time a Bruce Davidson’s was a single picture in Esquire of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother. And I didn’t know it was hers, but she had this picture of this sweet little old lady that looked like she was sitting there with a gun in her purse. And I thought that’s a remarkable picture, and I tore the page out. And then a few days later I met the person.
— (Neil Selkirk) You want another one? Okay, so I was in London in 1968. I was assisting Richard Avedon, I was in John Huston’s living room and I was sort of waiting for Anjelica to come and have her picture taken. You know, it’s key. And there were no photographs. There was one photograph above the door in this room. This was in 1968, which was the year after “New Documents.” And there were no photographs, and there were all sorts of weird things.
Things smelled strange and they were voodoo dolls and also the living room was an extraordinary place. But over the door was a picture of a family, three fat naked people with the back end of an American car sticking into it. Completely changed my life. I almost ran screaming into the street. It was – I’d never been affected, and never have by a work of art in that way before or since. And then it’s completely coincidental that I went up in the bloody darkroom printing it at the time. [Applause]
— (John Jacob) I think the photographer has answered that and we don't even want to follow. Next question? Last question?
— (Male Speaker) I just want to make a comment about museums’ roles today. How incredibly important it is, having grown up through all this period, I’ve come in contact with some of the people that you’ve talked about, but the most important thing is seeing the real prints. And without the museums, the National Gallery of Art special rooms, the Museum of Modern Art and other places, to see the actual prints. There’s no place else to see what the intention was.
And the same experience that you had, I had with Roy DeCarava prints. When I would see them in books, when I was a kid I would see these things, I would say why is this guy important? And to come and see the actual print is a – now I understand. And so I really want to give a boost for that. But with a quick question. What is, now that it’s the end of the silver period, what is the role of the museum going to be? Now it’s sort of locked in for museum work. The reproduction of contemporary work is now going to be able to be on the internet, computers and so on and so forth. Where the print, does it still matter?
— (Karan Rinaldo) Yes.
— (Jeff Rosenheim) Yeah sure, of course it does. And if artists are making objects and we want to understand what they’re doing, just like you did, we need to see them and we need to collect them. And some are going to change people’s lives like the DeCarava changed yours, let’s say, or Diane’s changed Neil’s. And we are, museums are places for objects and yes, there is the internet and yes, there’s digital material out in the world. But as long as artists are making things, we should collect them. [Applause]
— (John Jacob) Thank you. Thank you all for coming out this evening, spending a long afternoon with us. Please join me one more time in [applause] in saying thank you to this remarkable panel. They had to put up with my elaborate script and instructions and I think they did really well. Let them know. [Applause]
Credit
Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Generous support has been provided by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman, RayKo Photo, the Bernie Stadiem Endowment Fund, the Trellis Fund, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.
SAAM Stories
04/06/2018
In 1972, Diane Arbus became the first photographer to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. These pivotal works will be featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition, Diane Arbus: a box of ten photographs, opening at SAAM on Friday, April 6, and remaining on view through January 21, 2019
Lauren Kolodkin
External Affairs and Digital Strategies Assistant
