[Warning: This is not a happy blog post. You might want to save it for a rainy day.]
As I recently punched my way through Fred Ritchin’s 2009 tome, “After Photography,” a quote by Susan Sontag reminded me of Sontag’s non-fiction piece, “On Photography.” This,in turn, got me to thinking of Sontag’s painful and protracted suffering from acute myelogenous leukemia just before her death in late 2004 and I was reminded of images I had seen and which were recorded during her last days by Sontag’s committed partner, photographer Annie Leibovitz. I thought then of how painful it must have been for Leibovitz to take these photos, and what kind of gripping love and devotion must have motivated Leibovitz to undertake this kind of project, to record a loved one’s long slide into eternity. And it came to me that, in times of extreme duress, many photographers turn to their trade in an effort to hold on to both their love and their sanity.
When one mentions “photographer” and “sanity” in the same sentence, the next natural thing that pops into one’s mind is the name “Diane Arbus.” I use a somewhat incongruous Arbus quote at the top of my photography web site and the words distinctly tell you where Diane’s focus was when it came to photography. She was driven to photograph “…People who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do, beckoned, not driven, invented by belief, author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried, so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be.” (“The Full Circle”)
By coincidence, I recently came upon an article relating feminist Germaine Greer’s solitary encounter with Diane Arbus – and because it tells so much about Diane Arbus in her last tragic days – I relay Greer’s words here, from a 2005 article in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, entitled “Wrestling With Diane Arbus,” in which Greer talks about her one and only photo shoot with Arbus:
“She seemed too birdlike and delicate to be lugging her outsize camera bag on such a warm day. Her thin cheeks were red with exertion and her fine fairish hair stood out around her face in wisps. I asked her whether she would like a rest or refreshment or something of the sort, and she refused in a tiny voice, without looking up from her camera bag. I’d have liked something myself, but this seemed not to occur to her. Throughout the session she spoke very little and always in a deceptively apologetic murmur. She avoided facing me, as she ferretted in the big bag and patted her many pockets. She set up no lights, just pulled out her Rolleiflex, which was half as big as she was, checked the aperture and the exposure, and tested the flash. Then she asked me to lie on the bed, flat on my back on the shabby counterpane.
“I did as I was told. Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited. In her viewfinder I must have looked like a guppy or like one of the unfortunate babies into whose faces Arbus used to poke her lens so that their snotty tear-stained features filled her picture frame (e.g., A Child Crying, NJ, 1967). I knew that at that distance anybody’s face would have more pores than features. I was wearing no make-up and hadn’t even had time to wash my face or comb my hair.
“Pinned on the bed by her small body with the big camera in my face, I felt my claustrophobia kick in; my heart-rate accelerated and I began to wheeze. I understood that as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture. She would have got behind the public persona of Life cover-girl Germaine Greer, the “sexy feminist that men like”. I concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, and keeping my face blank. If it was humanly possible I would stop my very pupils from dilating. Immobilised between her knees I denied her, for hour after hour. Arbus waited me out. Nothing would happen for minutes on end, until I sighed, or frowned, and then the flash would pop. After an eternity she climbed off me, put the camera back in her bag and buggered off. A few weeks later she took an overdose of barbiturates and slit her wrists.”
What killed Arbus was not the drugs or the acute loss of blood. It was the final bout of a clinical depression Arbus perhaps suffered her whole life. When one looks at Arbus’ images – perhaps in chronological order as you might compare the final work of someone like Vincent Van Gogh – you stand witness to an artist’s long and painful slide into eternity.
