Schultz’s Arbus: Psychology Trumps Artistry

Review of William Todd Schultz, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 247 pages, ISBN 978-1-60819-519-0, Hardcover, $25.

William Todd Schultz’s description of the childhood of American photographer Diane (born Nemerov) Arbus (1923-1971) brings to mind some lines from Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “You come, you find a life ready-made, you just have to slip it on. … There were Things that were sad, once and for all, and there were pleasant Things, and a great number of incidental ones. And if a joy was arranged for you, it was in fact a joy, and you had to behave accordingly. All this was basically very simple, and once you got the knack of it, it took care of itself. For everything entered into these appointed boundaries” (in Stephen Mitchell, trans., 1982, pp. 9, 100-101).

Schultz shows us Arbus as a sensitive child in a wealthy and straight-laced mid-Manhattan family—the middle child of a self-absorbed mother and a busy executive father. Schultz uses John Bowlby’s attachment theory for purposes of psychological interpretation, identifying Arbus’ childhood governess, “Mamselle” (a young French woman), as the person to whom she primarily sought proximity. Arbus’ brother Howard, three years older, was someone with whom she felt closely allied and compatible. The family’s other child, Renee, was five years younger than Diane and not as important in her emotional life.

Schultz writes that attachment psychologists identify three childhood patterns: secure attachment, anxious attachment, and avoidance of attachment. The circumstances of Diane Arbus’ childhood and the record of her youthful behavior point to anxious attachment, Schultz tells us—adding that “an impressively massive amount of experimental research exists concerning the life outcomes of these three main styles…What Shaver and Mikulincer have convincingly shown is that anxiously attached children be-

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come hyperactivating adults” (p. 61).

So far this is plausible, even though Arbus in her adult life didn’t typically exhibit the kind of behavior that Schultz calls typical of hyperactivating adults, behavior such as helplessness and clinginess. But perhaps such traits were ameliorated in Diane when Allan Arbus slipped within the rigid boundaries of her sheltered life at age 13. He was an 18-year-old employee in the advertising department of her family’s business and was also soon a budding photographer. Since the attraction between Diane and Allan was mutual, she throve under his dependable and loving mentorship. They married when she turned 18 (in 1941), and after Allan’s World War II service, Diane’s father hired them to work together as fashion photographers for the family’s department store. Diane and Allan started their own family (two daughters) and gradually they also gained assignments from fashion magazines like Glamour, Vogue, and Seventeen.

In the mid-1950s, Diane grew tired of fashion photography and began taking portraits of unusual and marginalized people, which she continued to do the rest of her life. Occasionally she was paid to take such pictures, first in 1959 (the year her marriage broke up) when Esquire hired her to create a feature about New York City people, but usually she photographed simply for personal reasons. She discovered herself drawn to people who were born different and who accepted, perhaps even took pride in, their differences. I recall her telling me, in Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967, as she first walked through the spectacle that Haight Street had become, “These aren’t freaks, Paul, they’re imitators.” While she was there for a couple weeks, a Newsweek editor phoned at least twice in hopes of getting Haight-Ashbury photos from her, but she didn’t call him back and didn’t seem to take any pictures at all in that part of San Francisco, despite lodging there.

What Schultz writes about Arbus psychologically makes sense, but his considerable speculation about how her inner life related to her art strikes me as speculative and sometimes reductionist. In regard to psychology, Schultz utilizes theory, but on the subject of art he seems bereft of theory. Rather than pondering why great Arbus photos are great, he seems preoccupied with what he thinks they are not—not empathetic, not loving, and not even re-

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spectful. Schultz writes, “Because Arbus was traumatized, so were her sitters. Her sitters were made to show the same isolation, sadness, blankness, and confusion that she herself felt” (p. 91). Later he reiterates that “she made her subjects look as angry and alone and depressed and anxious as she was. They recorded her feelings. She created a visual world that reflected her and, in the process, consoled her” (p. 183). Again, “She aggressively seduced her sitters, dominated them, made them look how she wanted them to. They wound up feeling manipulated, confused, betrayed—‘Arbused.’ In short, they say they were deceived” (pp. 184-185). According to Schultz, “When subjects complained of having been ‘Arbused,’ what they were objecting to was being made to look like Arbus felt. Their expressions weren’t their own, they were the photographer’s. It was her secrets on display, not theirs” (p. 55). These four quoted passages are among scores which similarly reflect the absence of a theory of art in Schultz’s book, and in fact contradict the very nature of photography.

Occasionally chinks open in Schultz’s “denial.” He advances a promising hunch that “Arbus pursued a supplemental life, an abundance of selves instead of the one she’d been stuck with” (p. 19). But, this promising hunch remains an undeveloped throwaway line. Later, regarding her portraits of “freaks,” Schultz writes that “the pictures were thoroughly about her but not about her at the same time” (p. 81). Again, this hunch could have led Schultz toward pondering the role of inter-subjectivity in the dynamics of Arbus’ portraiture, but he doesn’t pursue it. Rather than pondering portrait art’s ambient dynamics, Schultz claims instead that Arbus somehow “projected” herself into her portraits of people. He continues: she “identified, but did she empathize? I don’t believe so, not to the extent most people think…She wasn’t finding other people’s secret selves; she was finding her own, over and over” (pp. 96-97). Near the end of his book, Schultz concludes that “Arbus looked in, and when the artist looks in, takes what’s there, and uses it, it’s never anything but a refinding” (p. 205).

This sounds reductionist. Schultz labels Arbus a “maker,” but actually no photographer with only the technology of her day was simply a maker. Photoshop and Illustrator didn’t exist. Schultz writes that “Arbus kept dipping into her subjective well”

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and “….then transposing what she saw there into images” (p. 205), but such a transposition was not actually possible. Instead, the fascination exerted by the best known Arbus portraits is intimately related to something about the persons they portray—something to which she was receptive—as well as to something about herself.

Granted that painters and poets could work solely from within, and many did so, but the work of photographers was finding. Rather than somehow “making,” photography recorded, and, in Arbus’ most compelling portraits, it also recognized. As Arbus in 1960 wrote to her close friend, the painter Marvin Israel, “You invent what I discover” (in Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 2011, p. 26). In her era of the 1950s and „60s, the recognition of an image to preserve and enlarge generally occurred while pouring over contact sheets. Then came the test of a larger print, a blow-up. What Arbus clearly sought, as Schultz sometimes implies, was entrance into some aspect of a subject’s inner life which resonated with some aspect of her own inner life.

This seems related to Arbus’ psychotherapy, which Schultz finds lacking. “It’s shocking,” he writes, “how unaverage the therapy was at its core. No presenting problem, no goals, no interpretation, no seeking of insight, no attempt to link up a subterranean, powerful past with a present way of being, and finally, no explicit or even implicit pursuit of the cloaked why” (p. 150). To me, this sounds like Arbus’ therapist, Helen Boigon, understood the danger of “objectifying” an artist’s inner life instead of nurturing it—which again brings Rilke to mind, since Rilke declined psychotherapy as likely to dissolve his creativity. What led to Arbus’ suicide probably had almost nothing to do with her photography but more to do with her hepatitis relapse, her money problems, an unusually prolonged spell of depression, and, most of all, taking an unreliable anti-depressant, Vivactil, which her therapist steadfastly opposed (pp. 174-175, 183-184).

Finally, I also differ with Schultz regarding the value of the 2003 book Revelations, a large tome filled photos and writings by Arbus. Schultz rhetorically asks, “What revelations did Revelations contain?”, and answers, “Not a great number” (p. 15). But his own book cites Revelations 78 times, more than any other source. Less reassuring, he also cites 62 times a source which I personally know

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to be unreliable: Patricia Bosworth’s 1984 book, Diane Arbus: A Biography.

Overall, William Todd Schultz has helped illuminate Diane Arbus psychologically but perhaps it will take a photographer/ writer—perhaps a fellow portraitist—to illuminate Arbus’ artistry.

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