The Complicated Family Dynamics in the Life and Work of Diane Arbus

Daughter and mother, possibly the lover of her own brother, what role did family secrets and fuzzy boundaries play in the photographer's art?

I’m trying out an idea where each month I do a deeper dive into the relationship between mental health and creativity for one specific artist. I’m starting with artists that I already began exploring in the research for my book, The Artist’s Mind, and then I’ll branch out. So, each month, there will be about one week of essays about a specific artist. Last month, it was Georgia O’Keeffe. This month, it’s Diane Arbus.

So far, for Diane Arbus, I’ve shared an overview of what I covered in my book chapter about her along with some of the material that didn’t make it from the first draft into the finished chapter. And then I shared a deeper look at one of her specific photographs: Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day. Today, I want to return to the book chapter that I wrote and the discussion of Diane Arbus’s sexuality. More specifically, I want to turn to the way that fuzzy boundaries in her family of origin might have potentially impacted her mental health and her art.

A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C., 1966, source

In Lubow’s 2016 biography, he revealed the shocking confession that Diane had not only likely had an incestuous relationship with her brother when she was a child, but that they had resumed the affair as adults, having sex with one another as recently as just a few weeks before her death. We can only guess at the sexual trauma and unhealthy dynamics that may have been at play in that relationship, what might have caused that to occur in the first place, what impact it might have had upon her psyche.