In Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, did Diane Arbus Capture the Essence of Depression in Another Woman?

Without depression and the sense of being an outsider, would Arbus ever have become the photographer that she was?

Yesterday, I shared an overview of the role that depression may have played in Diane Arbus’s creative process and content. Today, I wanted to take a closer look at a specific photograph with this idea in mind.

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Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day, is a photograph that Diane Arbus took in 1969, the same year that she started her final series featuring institutionalized women. On the surface, the woman pictured here couldn’t be more different from those women. This perfectly coiffed socialite is poised on a park bench, pearls around her neck, a stark contrast to the women with mental challenges who we picture in an institution. The dichotomy represents the two different sides of Arbus: the wealthy woman who ran in circles of elite people and the woman who didn’t feel like she fit in there and sought out the world’s misfits.

In many of Arbus’s pictures taken at the institution, the women she’s photographing seem to be having fun. They’re dressing up for Halloween. They’re cavorting on the grass. They’re playing like children. So, even though they are the world’s forgotten ones, with their developmental disabilities and mental illness, they are, more often than not, presented as happy in these images. 

And what about the socialite? In her life she was known as someone who was constantly happy. When Arbus’s friend Adrian Allen first saw this image, she recognized that she knew the woman in the photograph. But in the photograph, her expression is sad. Her brows are furrowed, perhaps because she’s squinting into the sun, but perhaps because she is unhappy. Her mouth turns up slightly at the corners, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Allen said she had never seen the woman look this way before, seeming so hopeless. Allen had only ever seen the woman laughing.