An Emergency in Slow Motion by Schultz William Todd

Author:Schultz, William Todd [Schultz, William Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Black Knot

Arbus made lists. Maybe more, in fact, than she made photographs. They are all over her notebooks, on scraps of paper, in grant applications, in letters to magazine editors. It’s simple. She didn’t want to lose a good thought. The lists made slipping glimpses tangible; they were mental roadmaps, to read. “Seance, gypsies, horse show, aquarium … woodpeckerholes, pseudoplaces, skeptics … baton twirlers, microcephalics, proms, ritual.” Sometimes entire phrases or sentences appeared, her own or passages copied out from books: “to lie in order to not be believed,” “every shock is a symbolic withdrawal of support,” “cruelty is often some extreme of compliment.”1 Inspirations came in bunches. Arbus was an idea machine, her mind a never-ending rush hour. She needed money, so there was always that impetus. After the separation, and after the divorce as well, Allan sent what cash he could, but alone it did not suffice. Besides, it was always important to Diane that she demonstrate financial independence, despite the fact that, much like her father, she was never especially good with money. According to Bosworth she carried it around in crunched wads, almost never stepping into a bank. Some of these ideas therefore became pitches she sent out haphazardly for work, with whatever magazines or editors expressed interest. Others, those that held more viable appeal, she explored on her own. Who ever knew which car might shoot the gap?

In the summer of 1970, exactly one year before her suicide, Arbus was busy keeping busy, scanning the files of the Daily News and other photo sources for samples of fixations. It was almost a scientific endeavor. All signature Arbus fixations found a place on the list: “accident, grief, pain, death of pet animals, murder victims, corruption, people hiding their faces, kidnapping, execution, suicides, before, during, after; riots, strikes, cyclones, flood, fire, dust storms, depression, breadlines, child abuse, closeted children, people dying of mysterious disease, photographers being shot.”2 It’s a Freudian free association, a web of perverse preoccupations full of individual topics—like breadlines, depression, closeted children—that would have resonated deeply. “People hiding their faces” recalls the shot of the Westchester family on their lawn, the father covering his eyes. Even kidnapping, a seemingly alien occurrence, was something Arbus feared as a child and wrote about in her adolescent autobiography. The last item—“photographers being shot”—grabbed Arbus especially. To her it was the perfect image. Two kinds of shooters, one managing, totally implausibly, to capture and arrest the precise moment of violence. Arbus loved that. These were the topics that caught her eye, that registered subjectively because of her unique biography, the images she sometimes cut out and taped to a wall above her bed for inspiration—of a dark sort, the sort that always got her going. The world she saw and the pictures she surrounded herself with were archaeological records of despair, danger, trauma. Even in her own shots, the faces that looked back at her were her, isolated fragments of discarded features of self. They covertly emphasized a basic misery.

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