A mystery, even to herself

Armed with their tiny Leicas and Nikons, most of the great postwar ‘street’ photographers liked to be unobtrusive; they wanted to capture life unobserved. Garry Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson haunted the city in search of the ‘decisive moment’. Somebody I know was photographed by Robert Doisneau, a very ghostly snapper. Doisneau entered the room and then left. His subject was baffled; he had not seen him take any shots at all.

And then along came Diane Arbus. She was small but very noticeable, partly because of her childlike good looks but mainly because of the big flash and brick-heavy and breeze-block-sized Rolleiflex or Mamiya slung round her neck. She asked people if she could photograph them and then she took them standing still — the unobtrusives had always wanted to capture movement. Often she would befriend her subjects and get invitations to their homes, seeking ever better shots through familiarity.

The aesthetic shift is familiar. The unobtrusives were classicists, dispassionate observers of the human comedy. Arbus and her many followers were romantics; they put themselves in the frame; it was their presence that made the moment decisive. The cost of romanticism can be high, and Arbus paid it in full. Chronically baffled by her own identity, she finally obliterated it in 1971, taking a handful of barbiturates and slashing her wrists. She was 48.

Now she is seen as one of the finest American artists of the late 20th century, like Andy Warhol a product of New York, the period’s greatest city, and like Jackson Pollock a hero of art as the perpetual sacrifice of the life. This means, among other things, that her legacy is jealously guarded. There are none of her photographs in this book. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York controls the archive and it is ‘closed indefinitely to outside researchers’.