A young boy in Central Park, mouth agape, his hand contorted in a claw-like position, holding a hand grenade. A man posing naked, a mask of white makeup and lipstick, his penis tucked between his legs.

A young boy in Central Park, mouth agape, his hand contorted in a claw-like position, holding a hand grenade.

A man posing naked, a mask of white makeup and lipstick, his penis tucked between his legs.

Twin girls with haunting facial expressions one partially smiling and the other staring in pensive silence.

These are some examples of Diane (Dee-Ann) Arbus famous photos. She was best known for her photos of the odd, the damaged and those that lived on the fringes of New York society. Patricia Bosworth's biography of Arbus makes note of her work and inspiration rife with Jungian underpinnings:

Diane savored words like quest, aristocracy, rituals, legends, kingdom, and she began to view the world in mythic terms... As she pursued her dwarfs and giants, eccentrics and extremes, she would explore the winding paths of self-dramatization, contradiction, and ambivalence in her subjects. (p. 29)

In Arbus' words:

There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. (Diane Arbus, Monograph, p. 2)

Bosworth notes Arbus' adoration of Jung's writings, thus it seems only appropriate to analyze her through her photos which embraces Jungian constructs in the mystical fairy tale that was Arbus' world.

Background: Capturing The Shadow in The Darkroom

According to Jung, one must get in touch with one's Shadow before one can truly get in touch with the Self.Jung defines the Shadow as being the receptacle for all of the things the conscious mind renounces - the Dark Side of human nature. Diane Arbus' journey from fashion photographer, wife, mother to "freak photographer" to suicide at 48, is a journey during which this phenomenal artist, in essence, became her Shadow. One need only peruse a collection of her work to experience this palpable darkness - her photo of a flower girl at a wedding framed against a ghostly background of dark sky and fog, nudists looking content in the context of the Garden of Eden gone to seed and rot, her image of identical twins which became famous for Stanley Kubrik's use of it to portend evil in "The Shining."

She was born Diane Nemerov in 1923 to wealthy Jewish parents who were tycoons of the fashion industry in Manhattan. When she was 14, she met Alan Arbus and was married to him only a month after she turned 18. Alan began as a photographer in the Signal Corps and then moved into fashion photography. Diane became his assistant and eventually his partner. She insisted on playing the housewife role to perfection: the Betty Crocker wife, housekeeper, mother and she believed that women should live under the wing of a man. Eventually, she became disenchanted with fashion photography and slowly morphed into art photographer, capturing the horror, the filth, but ultimately the humanity of New York's underbelly. It's interesting to note when examining the Shadow in her life, that Arbus claims her biggest problem was that she never experienced adversity.Stuart Greenman, in his play "Silence Cunning Exile" (based on Arbus' life) describes the phenomenon as follows:

Suzie (Arbus character): What if you open your coat, button by button, and there's nothing there?

Kiki: You get raped. You get fucked. Because then there's something there.

As Arbus states:

one of the things I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity. I felt confirmed in a sense of unreality - the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one. (Bosworth, p. 30)

She told a friend that she envied a girlfriend who'd been raped. She wanted to have that punishing, degrading experience, too. She likened it to murder - the murder of a woman's nature and body - though the woman lived to tell the tale. Bosworth's biography on Arbus details numerous incidents when Diane tempted fate so that she could explore this dark facet of human nature. I believe she later explored it because she identified closely with it as evidenced in such photos as retarded patients when she herself was undergoing treatment for mental illness.

Process: Persona - Exposure

Jung illuminated the construct of the persona in the following:

Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face. ("Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. p. 43)

Thus, Jung believed it was crucial to strip oneself of the false mask that is the persona. No one else has been able to take an Arbus photograph, though others have taken pictures of similar freakish subject matter. The difference was in her ability to convince people to drop the mask - the persona that people hide behind in social situations. Once she was able to eliminate the mask, she usually photographed her subjects dead center and used a black frame as though she were saying "This is My Portrait of the Common Man." If you think about it, most people's automatic response when being photographed is to smile, creating a social mask. For Diane, convincing people to drop this mask involved intensely personal discussion with strangers, using her magnificent powers of empathy, photographing people she just met in their bedrooms, sex/ flirtation, flattery, etc. In fact, Patricia Boswoth's biography paints Diane as a frightened and fragile creature who felt the need to constantly conquer her fear and believed that a person could only understand something once they have confronted it. She thought that when a person had sex, restraints were broken and inhibitions disappeared. According to Arbus, sex was the "quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being" (Boswoth, p. 256) and the best way to get a person to present who they are at their core to Arbus' ground glass lens. Critics have stated that we see her photos more with our minds than with our eyes. As Bosworth writes, "She could psych out what a person was feeling. Her camera seemed to X-ray it and capture it as in a vice." (p.235). She believed that picture taking was something of a profound out-of-body experience in that a person steps outside themselves when they are being photographed, trying to present himself as the image his mind's eye tells he should be - creating a persona. She stated that photographing those who were blind was quite different:

It was weird photographing the blind because they can't fake their expressions - they don't know what their expressions are, so there is no mask. (Bosworth, p. 164)

Her photos don't always depict the subject devoid of persona, but she also played with the persona concept in her series of mask photos: women and men at charity balls, eyes mysteriously lurking behind Mardi Gras-type masks; a naked man posing as a woman, his face a bright white disk of make-up; and most disturbingly, her infamous photos of the retarded in what resemble masks of death - photographed shortly before her suicide.

Anima/Animus

Jung defined the Anima and Animus as being personifications of the soul which take on the characteristics of the opposite sex. Anima is the female soul image of a man, and the Animus the male soul image of a woman. In other terms, Animus represents Diane's developing "masculine traits" of strength, courage, aggression. Arbus' photos are quite representative of this construct and the gender confusion which she herself seemed to have suffered from. Some of her best-known photos were of cross dressers, transvestite male prostitutes, transsexuals, and masculine women puffing on cigars. Bosworth writes:

When she photographed the man in curlers and the woman smoking a cigar, she was able to capture the confusion of male and female identities trapped in a single personality. (p. 27)

Her photos contain parallels to her own animus/anima confusion. Arbus never considered herself a feminist. She was shy, wore ballet slippers, and her voice was small, like a little girl's and she believed that a woman should "live under the wing of a man." Giving birth and menstruation seemed most incredible and mysterious miracle to her and gloried in her femininity. She doted on daughter Doon and was embarrassed by her success/talents that didn't involve motherhood. Incongruously, she kept her hair cropped short and had a male lust for danger and adventure, especially when she would get picked up and have sex with strangers. "She was obviously courting danger," Gay Talese remarks. "In that respect she was like a man. Otherwise she was completely feminine." (pg 234) Diane was as fascinated by gender confusion, sexual conflict, sexual role playing and ambiguity as she was in sexual intercourse "she believed masculine and feminine were transcendent realities." (p. 94)

Andy Warhol writes that "in the early 60s, drag queens were psychosexual phenomena. They weren't even accepted in freak circles until 1967". The more she photographed transvestites, the more she connected their sexual identity with nature, personality, and style. Because her photos speak volumes about sexual/gender confusion and because Diane herself was a bit of a sexual enigma, it seems appropriate to assume that her art imitated her life where Jung's concepts of anima/animus were writ large.

Individuation: Developing the Photo

To Jung, individuation means becoming one's own self or self-realization. The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the façade of the persona (mask). In the Individuation process, According to Jung, one must get in touch with the Shadow and Anima/Animus before one can truly get in touch with the Self. In other words, individuation can also be thought of as the mid-life crisis - the period in one's life when they question who they are, where they are going, and how they are going to get there. After exploring her dark side and the "male soul image" in her life and seeing how they informed her artistic vision, Arbus and her husband separated (1959) which was considered the time when she really developed as an artist: her mid-life crisis lead to her most prolific period of work. Even more influential than the break up of her marriage was her transformation as part of the times: the Betty Crocker stay-at-home mom of the 50s became something of radical figure in the 60s. She experimented with drugs, photographing hard-core addicts and alcoholics. She became very promiscuous in her quest for connection with humanity and, as mentioned previously, in her desire get the right shot. Bosworth writes:

She also used her innate sexuality. After the dissolution of her marriage, Arbus embarked on a wild and erotic quest to somehow rejoin herself to a humanity she felt increasingly alienated from. Apparently she photographed sex orgies, bondage scenes and became increasingly interested in sexual/erotic subjects. She also engaged in a number of intimate, but ultimately unrewarding, sexual affairs. (p. 256)

While this this period of individuation was quite fruitful artistically, it also represented a great sense of loss in her life - loss of her husband, of her financial stability, of her previous mode of existence. Her urgent need to connect to humanity led to her haunting photos of widows photographed in their bedrooms and other photos illustrating disconnection, loss of innocence. When she began photographing the mentally retarded, the art world shuddered - had she gone too far? Was she being incredibly exploitative or deeply humane? When she committed suicide at 48, it was rumored that she photographed the event. Her photographs prior - of the retarded in Halloween costumes and what appeared to be death masks - portend her own death. Her quest for the Grail - the person devoid of the mask - had become too hot for her to handle.

It would have been easy to apply a personality theorist other than Jung to do an analysis of Diane Arbus: Horney to explain her neurosis/obsessive compulsiveness; Freud to elucidate the unavoidable influence of sexuality and aggression her work; Erickson to boil her down to a product of her East Coast Jewish community, product of the 60s, an identity crisis. Of all of the theorists, I felt no one else could give better analytic voice to her personality than Carl Jung as she was so fond of his writings and his constructs appear so vividly in both her life and her work. After all, Jung did believe that the black material of the unconscious was fodder for great creativity, just as Arbus created beauty in the midst of her dark vision.

© Molly Norton
October 20, 2002

Molly Norton is a writer and actress in San Francisco whose work has been featured recently in Salon.com.
E-mail:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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