Diane Arbus

Not just our Resident Evil experts.

No, we have with us the two of the only Diane and Ryan from Happily Ever Aftermath.

Welcome!

Hello.

No, uh, I don't know.

Spielbergo.

But Shaneberg, you might know him from his eight other credits, including The Prom, the Deborah Harry music video Strike Me Pink, Hit Me, This, and Fur, Colin, and Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.

And, of course, Rupture, starring Noomi Rapace.

Biographies usually focus on one life at a time.

But what happens when you set two great lives side by side? In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, esteemed biographer and literary, art and film critic Geoffrey Myers responds to this question in our conversation about parallel lives from Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath.

Inspired by the ancient writer Plutarch's dual biography method, Parallel Lives takes an innovative approach to biography, pairing famous figures in unexpected ways.

What makes these pairings so intriguing is how they uncover common threads of creativity, ambition and struggle across vastly different areas.

I mean, these are really interesting people.

What gave them this creative power? Was it an accident of birth? Was it education? Was it their friendship? Was it their environment? Was it their self-education? Was it their ambition? I think the central theme was what contributed to their creative genius, if you just want to put it in one sentence.

Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath form the final pairing in your book.

What parallels did you find between a confessional poet and a boundary-pushing photographer, and what larger understanding of creativity and suffering emerged from comparing their lives?

Yeah.

Yeah.Because some of the artists that you cite as early influences are John Waters and Diane Arbus and William Eggleston, and I wondered why you, you thought or you think that Diane Arbus and William Eggleston are still, still influence young people after all this time.

'Cause it, do you think it's because they show ordinary and enormous suffering without any self-pity?

Yeah.

But that was very early kind of experiment with it, and in some ways I was like, it took, it took a lot, and I remember feeling at the opening like, "I could have faked this and no one would've known." [laughs]

'Cause with the, the, you know, the idea of depraved AI, was, were you curious about people's capacity for cruelty? Like, you talk about the slave trade and, and the Holocaust and was, is, was that...

And, like, even, you know, thinking about Diane Arbus and William Eggleston, there's such a sense of loneliness and what's happened to people and how people survive such extreme treatment.

Yeah.

I've only, uh, introduced myself to three photographers in, that came into Magnum.

Um, I guess Philip Jones Griffiths, who was a friend of mine from way back, um, and, um, uh, uh, Gilles Gilles Peres, who was a, a, a, another friend, and Arbus.

Mm.

And I guess we all had the same kind of approach.

I just remember it being very weird.

It stars Nicole Kidman as iconic American photographer Diane Arbus, who is known for her strange, disturbing images, and also features Robert Downey Jr. and Ty Burrell.

[laughs] Okay.

And who directed it?

I'm in Times Square by myself and, uh, you know, I'm just peering into the adult world and, and going to, uh, one place in particular, uh, called Hubert's, uh, Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus, and it was a sideshow.

And I, I found out years later, this is where Diane Arbus did her first project in this place called Hubert's, and there's a book of her work, uh, uh, that, that one can get.

But this was her first project, and I can understand why, because I was, I was actually going there at the time that she was photographing there.

Of course, I didn't know that that was happening.

...

the street.

Certainly, Diane Arbus used the flash on the street, but not with long shutter speed.

You know, not with like an eighth of a second or, or, or h- or a quarter of a second [clears throat] on dark days only, 'cause that's all you can do with a Leica 'cause the synchronization-

Yeah, yeah.

And I thought it was interesting that you quoted that Diane Arbus said that a photograph is a secret of a secret.

And-

Mm-hmm

Is

he the country music photography equivalent of Diane Arbus? No.

Do you know what they said about Diane Arbus? A lot of the stuff.

They said giving Diane Arbus a camera was like giving a child a hand grenade.

Because she could make somebody, like if she didn't like you, she could make you look pretty bad.

That's a good description.