Some Memories of a Few Meetings.

I met Diane Arbus in Tompkins Square Park during the warm months of 1967. The first time I saw her I knew it had to be Arbus by the way she approached people and of course, I saw she had a square format camera. I observed her for just a few moments and then I made the photograph of her before I walked over to her. When I reached her I said,

“ You must be Diane Arbus. I watched the way you approached someone, and I was sure it was you.” She had feline qualities, gentleness and a stalking quality intertwined. And I could see what I read as a look of compassion and concern as she first talked to a subject.

She responded by asking me if I thought that the way I approached people influenced what my photographs looked like?

I was not sure whether I was being put on the defensive or was being asked a straightforward question, and I was shocked that she seemed genuinely interested in the question as much as I and further- more talked to me as an equal.

I told her that I had never given it much thought until that moment. It was an idea that came to me as I observed her with a subject about to make a picture. At that moment the connection seemed obvious.

After putting that question aside for the moment I pulled all my courage together and asked if I could visit her and show her a portfolio of my work. I was self-taught. I had been photographing for a little more than a year and there was certainly no one to whom I would rather show a portfolio.

I was not looking for a teacher or even a mentor. I believed that inspiration, direction, and motivation came from deep inside. I was simply looking for approval, acceptance and perhaps even recognition from the only photographer that I thought was working in uncharted territory. She said yes she would see me and gave me her phone number, but she told me to call her in about two months because she would be moving soon. I was, of course, elated and also very nervous. I called her once and she said she had just moved into the new apartment and told me to call in about six weeks when things settled down. After another call, we made an appointment date. It was to be in the morning.

When I arrived at her East 11th St. apartment she was wearing a mini-skirt. I don’t believe I ever saw her in anything but a mini-skirt except at her NYU lecture. She was wearing pants then. She seemed somewhat distracted and not entirely comfortable or at home in her new place. She couldn’t find things. Part of the apartment was on one floor and you had to go out into a hall and upstairs to go to the rest of the living space. Alone with her, I was surprised at my strong response to her as a woman.
I had come seeking one thing, but she seemed to be offering something different. She seemed vulnerable and down to earth. She was worried about her children. She was also worried about some work, but she mentioned her children several times. It might have been because of the murders in the neighborhood.

She wanted to know how to get a police photographers’ pass. She thought I might know how to do that. She might have known that my pictures of the murder  of Groovy Hutchins had been on the front page of the Daily News and sent by associated press around the world. I think she might have wanted to do something like Weegee at crime scenes, but in her own way.
This was all before she curated the Wegee show. I don’t think I had a clue of how to get a police pass, but it seemed very much on her mind and she seems to think I might help her. Finally I, or perhaps she, turned the subject to my portfolio of photographs. She looked carefully and then gave me almost no approval. She said that my work looked a lot like Helen Levitt’s work. I was embarrassed that I did not know Levitt’s work and immediately went from her house to the Strand Book- store around the corner to find out about it.

Critically she told me my work seemed to be too much about the dignity of man. She stopped and said directly, “Stop making good pictures and use the camera as a tool of discovery, like a microscope or a telescope”. Those words always come back to me in almost every context that I have used a camera since.

She moved the conversation to her own photographs. She asked me what I saw in her pictures. “Did I think her pictures were cruel?” I did not-- at all. I had not seen that in them that moment that she raised the question. I told her that. I said something like I thought they were compassionate and I asked if ultimately wasn’t she was trying to express her own sense of emotional damage and crippleness. She did not answer.
I left after some tea or coffee. That was what she was having trouble finding when I first got there.
I saw her only a few more times.

After she moved to Westbeth, we would see each other on the number No. 1 train as I was going to or coming from my shrink in the West 90’s. She might have been doing the same. A few weeks after her death I called Lisette Model to ask her if she knew what the precipitating factors were. My own father committed suicide before I was born, so I had some comfort probing about those actions.

Lizette’s’ reply was, “For zat my darling, you vill haft to ask her psychiatrist.” End of conversation.

When I joined the American Society of Magazine Photographers, there was a publication requirement and also one needed two members to sign the membership application.
I had a meeting with Cornell Capa about some videography that I was doing for him. I had one of the first portable video cameras imported from Japan and I had occasionally done some video for Capa. including a lecture of Robert Frank and a small private reception with Walker Evans the night before his show opened at MOMA.

At that meeting I asked Cornell if he would be one of my supporters. He agreed. During the conversation he mentioned that he was seeing Diane that afternoon to arrange her presentation in the next lecture series. I told him that I had asked Diane if she would be a supporter and I asked if he would bring the paper to her for the signature.

We “serious” photographers thought of the organization as sort of a joke, but it was the way we could buy health insurance at group rates. Photographers in advertising,  fashion, and annual reports dominated the organization and I thought of them as entirely commercial. It seems today that photographers who do that kind of work actually think of themselves as artists and why shouldn’t they since major cultural institutions devote time, space and money to it. Of course those institutions do take fabulous sums of money from the fashion world.

In spite of all of my reservations about ASMP and its commercial influences, I remember being really proud when the ASMP published its new list of members with Capa and Arbus as my sponsors.

The final pictures I made of Diane was at the lecture she did for Cornell Capa’s Concerned Photographer’s series at NYU in the fall of 1970. Those pictures  are here.  is on the next page.

The last time I saw her was on wonderful spring morning in ’71. I was on the No. 1 train traveling home after a therapy session, and she got at 14th St. We smiled at each other and she sat down next to me. I had a bunch of daffodils in my hand. They were for my wife Judith. I pulled a few of  the daffodils out of the bunch as we pulled into Christopher St. Station made her smile and she softly said, “Thank you Nathan”.

It was a fleeting meeting.  She got off at the next stop.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus 1967, Tompkins Square Park