Diane Arbus' Risk-Taking Behavior Resulted In A Legacy of Outstanding Photographs ... Was It Motivated By Depression?
How did mental health symptoms impact the choices that Arbus made in regards to her subjects and the locations she visited to photograph them?
This is how art and health intersect for a famous artist. If you are interested in understanding this relationship in your own life: Order a Creative Health Assessment or Book a 1:1 Coaching Call.
This is an edited excerpt of an early version of the chapter on Diane Arbus in my book The Artist’s Mind. The book itself, obviously, has the final version, which expands upon Arbus’s work but doesn’t include some of the specifics of mental health and sexuality that I’ve shared here today.
Diane Arbus, born on March 14, 1923, left an indelible mark on the world of photography with her striking portraits of individuals often considered on the fringes of society. She photographed a broad spectrum of people, from the so-called circus “freaks” (‘Siamese twins,’ giants, little people) to those who simply didn’t fit into society’s norms of the time (the LGBTQAI+ community, nudists). The mark she made on the art world wasn’t only in her choice of subject but her more broad willingness to challenge convention, paving the way for countless artists who came after her, including Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Beyond her artistic achievements, Arbus’s life and struggles with mental health offer a lens through which we can examine the intricate relationship between creativity, identity, and mental wellbeing. Arbus’s photography, characterized by its raw intimacy and unflinching gaze, challenges conventional notions of beauty and “normalcy.” At the heart of Arbus’s artistry lies a profound exploration of the self. Raised in a privileged environment plagued by early experiences of depression, she grappled throughout her lifetime with feelings of alienation and a longing for connection. Her photographs, often depicting moments of vulnerability and introspection, serve as a mirror reflecting her own inner turmoil.
Diane Arbus had documented periods of depression as early as age 11. Her mother also suffered from depression, so there might be a genetic and/or an intergenerational trauma component to her condition. Writer Alex Mar describes a time when Diane’s mother, “...suffered a nervous breakdown that left her unable to wash or dress for many months, while the children were cared for by the help; during this period, 11-year-old Diane locked herself in her bedroom for hours at a time.” As biographer Patricia Bosworth puts it, “she’d lived with depression always - melancholia had pervaded the atmosphere” of her childhood home.
Reportedly, her teachers were concerned about her depression during her last year of high school. And when she met her photography mentor, Lisette Model, the mentor was immediately struck by how emotionally fragile Arbus seemed. Her early photographs from this time were as “wispy and frail” as she was, a blurred and out of focus image of a balloon floating away, for example. Lubow writes:
“The photographs Arbus brought to show her new teacher were wispy and frail: dead leaves, discarded newspapers, flyaway balloons. The 33-year-old Arbus was alternating between manic euphoria and debilitating despair. “I’ve been a balloon for months so that when I was strong I was so light I almost floated away and a blue balloon is like one of Pooh’s so no one could tell me from the sky,” she wrote to a friend in 1958, “and when I was weak all the air sputtered and fizzled and fluttered out of me.”
Biographers and scholars have speculated about the possible influence of bipolar disorder on her behavior, citing manic episodes and impulsive tendencies. Biographer William Todd Shultz quotes a letter Arbus wrote in 1968 describing extreme ups and downs where she is “breathless with excitement” and then just as quickly her “energy…just leaks out.” This description indicates that she might have had rapid cycling bipolar depression, although ultimately this is only a post-humous guess.
Arbus’s legacy has been plagued by oversimplification, particularly in regards to her sexuality. Arbus has been repeated defined as an unusually highly sexual woman who regularly put her own safety and even life at risk by visiting dangerous areas to photograph in them. This is arguable. On one hand, it may simply reflect society’s often-Puritanical norms and expectations of women, especially women such as Arbus who came from “proper” (well-to-do) backgrounds. Demeaning her sexual energy and calling the areas she visited “dangerous” could be a reflection of the mores of the time, rather than anything else. She was known to sometimes have sex with the “freaks” she photographed, as well as to have participated in an orgy with some of her photography subjects; this perhaps makes her “not vanilla” but certainly doesn’t indicate any sort of pathology.
That said, if we imagine that these things are have some validity - and there are accounts where she herself said that she was afraid of the places she went to take her photographs, although whether she was simply anxious or truly fearful for her life is up for debate - then we can also consider the role that her mental health played in these choices. Could they be indications of the manic aspect of bipolar disorder? Experts generally say she was more likely bipolar than unipolar, for what that’s worth; people with bipolar depression often get misdiagnosed with major depression, particularly if they tend to seek treatment during the depressive periods, rather than the manic ones, so it’s hard to say. But of it’s true that she lived with unipolar (major) depression and further if it’s true that she was unusually sexual (again, take that with a grain of salt) and that she pursued her art in situations that felt dangerous to her, there could be another explanation: perhaps Arbus was simply trying to feel something.
Living with depression myself, I know that most often what you feel is numb. You feel a sort of itchy restlessness muted down by extreme fatigue. At least, that’s what I often feel. And there were times in my life where, unwittingly, I created stress and anxiety and drama and sometimes trauma for myself because, I think, I just needed to feel something. Because, I think, I was trying to outrun depression. I don’t know if that was something Arbus experienced. But it’s what comes to mind for me.
Here, a direct excerpt of a paragraph I wrote from The Artist’s Mind, that indicates she may relate:
Sigmund Freud, whose theories have many problems to consider but who nevertheless played a key role in the history of psychology, posited that we have two drives: Eros, the sexual, life drive and Thanatos, the death drive. One could argue that working through her depression, Arbus was attempting to thwart Thanatos so that Eros could thrive within her. Biographer Arthur Lubow writes of a time Diane recollected back to when she was a girl at summer camp, and all of the other girls were bitten by leeches but she was not, “She complained that she had rarely felt anything in her entire life. She was untouched by the ordinary joys and pains that make people feel alive.” She admitted at least once to persistently attempting to get in contact with direct feeling and that the bodily experiences of "Childbirth and menstruation were two of the only experiences that had provided her with the sense of being connected, almost the sole experiences that had bestowed upon her a twinge of joy."
Biographer Patricia Bosworth describes that Arbus continued to struggle with depression throughout the 1960s. By this time she had been diagnosed with hepatitis, and blamed her depressive symptoms on that. The most prevalent symptom of this depression was extreme exhaustion. Having had a bad reaction to medication in the past (a drug called Vivactil made her depression worse and caused her anxiety), she refused to try the antipsychotic drugs that were recommended to her at this time by her doctor. Instead, she opted for therapy, attending weekly sessions for two years leading up to her death. Despite these efforts to get better, Arbus died on July 26, 1971, from an overdose of barbiturates in combination with slitting her wrists.
Resources
These resources were utilized when writing the book chapter that inspired this article.
Alex Mar, “The Cost of Diane Arbus's Life on the Edge,” The Cut, July 12, 2016, https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/diane-arbus-c-v-r.html.
Anthony Bannon, “The Biography Diane Arbus Always Deserved,” The Buffalo News, June 26, 2016, https://buffalonews.com/lifestyles/the-biography-diane-arbus-always-deserved/article_66f04335-f7a1-5e75-a039-9c2b6ebcb5ee.html.
Anthony Lane, “In the Picture: A New Biography of Diane Arbus.,” The New Yorker, June 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/diane-arbus-portrait-of-a-photographer.
Arthur Lubow, “The Woman Who Influenced Diane Arbus's Eye,” The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones & Company, May 25, 2016) https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woman-who-influenced-diane-arbuss-eye-1464187560.
Arthur Lubow and Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (New York, United States, NY: Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017), 18-19.
Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 121-122.
Diane Leach, “Diane Arbus: ‘Happiness Perplexed Her,’” PopMatters, February 21, 2020, https://www.popmatters.com/diane-arbus-portrait-of-a-photographer-by-arthur-lubow-2495417010.html.
Jacqui Palumbo, “Revisiting Diane Arbus's Final and Most Controversial Series,” Artsy, November 8, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-revisiting-diane-arbuss-final-controversial-series.
Jenna Ross, “Diane Arbus: Purveyor Photographer Of The Weird And Wacky,” TheCollector, April 28, 2020, https://www.thecollector.com/diane-arbus-photographer/.
Jessie Wender, “The Subject of an Arbus,” The New Yorker, April 8, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-subject-of-an-arbus.
Lyle Rexler, “Through Her Lens Darkly: Diane Arbus’s Life Was as Raw as Her Work,” The New York Times, July 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/diane-arbus-biography-by-arthur-lubow.html.
Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus (Creative Arts Television Archive, Contemporary Arts Media (distributor), 1972).
Parul Sehgal, “Diane Arbus’s Sexual Adventures,” BookForum, 2017.
Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York, NY: W. W. Norton Company, 2005), 286.
Sean O'Hagan, “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer Review – a Disturbing Study,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, October 25, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/diane-arbus-portrait-of-a-photographer-review-arthur-lubow.
Tara Murtha, “'Diane Arbus': Genius? Predator? Is There a Difference?,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 4, 2016, https://www.inquirer.com/philly/entertainment/20160904__Diane_Arbus___Genius__Predator__Is_there_a_difference_.html.