Newsstand Memento Mori: The Magazine Work of ... - Megan Lau

Newsstand Memento Mori:
The Magazine Work of Richard Avedon &
Diane Arbus
Megan Lau
April 17, 2009

Newsstand Memento Mori:
The Magazine Work of Richard Avedon &
Diane Arbus
Like a glint of light striking film, the history of American photography is indelibly and
darkly marked by the work of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) and Richard Avedon (1923-2004).
Both produced original and explosive art featured in major museum exhibits in their lifetime.
Accordingly, Avedon and Arbus are solely recognized as revolutionary artists. However,
the lasting influence of their output owes greatly to their magazine work, as both were also
commercial photographers. For publications as varied as Sports Illustrated and Seventeen, Avedon
and Arbus engaged in portraiture and photo-reportage, which was often gritty and bleak. Arbus’s
photographs for various publications capture her subjects in liminal, ephemeral moments—
caught between genders, poses, or costumes—representing the symbolic death of the “normal”
man, woman, and family. The Barthesian punctum in Arbus’s images is that everything appears
an uncanny spectre—a distorted version of the world represented in generic family albums or in
Life magazine. Life perverted can be seen in Arbus’s editorials “Family Colloquies” for Esquire
and “American Families” for the Sunday Times Magazine. Inadvertently recuperating the work of
his colleague Arbus, Avedon stepped into the role of the mortician-photographer in the 1980s.
Often regarded as a master of fashion photography, Avedon’s lively and sophisticated fashion
images ruled the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for over three decades. However, faced
with his own mortality, Avedon’s work as staff photographer for The New Yorker in the 1990s
and onward reflects the late photographer’s fixation with the macabre and death, especially in
the fashion-photo-narrative “In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort.” These examples
of Avedon and Arbus’s editorial works serve as photographic memento mori works. These are not
necessarily meditations on one’s own mortality, as death is also figuratively represented in the loss
of common values and the dissolution of the family unit. This paper seeks to outline the magazine
Newsstand Memento Mori • 1

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work of Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, as well as the personal, cultural and political issues
that served as its context. Additionally, through surveying these photographs, I seek establish the
demise of the American dream as thematic relationship which connects Avedon and Arbus in an
artistic dialogue about human mortality, loss, and longing.
I have chosen magazine photography as a point of entry into the work of Diane Arbus and
Richard Avedon out of a personal affinity for magazines. I would not be the first—or the last—to
acknowledge that I first became enamoured with photography while gazing at the pages of Vogue
and Vanity Fair. Most anyone who has flipped through a magazine at a grocery store checkout
or sidewalk newsstand knows glossy photographs are both the subject of lust and a source of
artistic instruction. Successful fashion editorials and celebrity portraits teach magazine readers to
look, illustrating the thrill and allure of light and colour, and inviting romanticism through the
possibility of truth in the photographic image. Thus it is fitting that Arbus and Avedon, two major
figures in American photography, began their careers in fashion photography for magazines such
as Seventeen, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, and eventually transformed the way America looked at
itself. In the wake of social, political, and cultural disorder during in the 1960s, both employed
mainstream magazines as a medium to create the new social iconography of an age.
Accordingly, magazine photography is a fruitful point of critical inquiry because, by nature,
the medium must respond to the zeitgeist of an age. Mainstream magazines—unlike books, which
have a longer shelf life—are regularly issued documents of the month or week they are released on
the newsstand. Even fashion magazines must respond to current events. Furthermore, magazine
contributors are given a relatively short time to reflect, lending their work the immediacy of
newspaper reportage. Thus, magazine work presents a rich intersection between journalism, art,
commentary, and commerce. This is not to suggest that all magazine photography is noteworthy.
However, the magazine work of masters such as Arbus and Avedon constitutes a distinguished
and prolific body.
In the 1940s-1960s, magazine work was the sole means of earning a living for many “serious
art” photographers. American masters such as Robert Frank, William Klein, Irving Penn, and
Louis Faurer made it acceptable for photographers to finance their art through commercial
projects. Even in the face of whatever artistic compromises photographers were required to make,
assignments in mainstream magazines also afforded them opportunities to work, greater access
to people and events, and exposure to a large audience. Fortuitously, this era in the magazine
industry was particularly notable for its artistic innovation. Leading magazines of the period

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were “constantly attempting to challenge, expand, and redefine the nature of the publications
themselves and the important cultural, political, and social issues of the day” (Southall in Arbus,
1984, p. 154). Inspired by competition against television for audience and advertising dollars,
magazines reinvented ways to draw in readers. The economic circumstances created a competitive
atmosphere in which magazines creatively thrived; staff and contributors vied for the best projects
and endeavoured to consistently produce exemplary editorials (Southall in Arbus, 1984). The
culmination of these elements resulted in some of the most enduring examples of groundbreaking
design in magazine history—notably George Lois’s work at Esquire and Alexey Brodovitch’s design
at Harper’s Bazaar. These innovators changed the nature of how photographers’ work operated
within a magazine. The editors and art directors of leading magazines understood the value of the
image to do more than simply illustrate the text; photographs could also offer commentary. In
show of respect for the visual artist’s work, photographers were given relative editorial freedom
to create their own projects and choose how their images would be displayed1 .
Another factor that facilitated and shaped the work of Arbus and Avedon was the rise of
distrust towards the impossible optimism of post-war years. If the 1950s and the early 1960s
were an age where the pursuit of the American dream could be upheld without irony, the
following years openly mocked those ideals. As a result, the values and belief system of magazines’
readership had changed; they had become more sceptical and cynical. Publications needed to
reinvent themselves to serve a readership that saw themselves as politically and socially engaged.
This urban and urbane readership sought authenticity and subversiveness through declaring
themselves informed about and sympathetic to subcultures. Accordingly, Arbus’s “freaks” and
Avedon’s unkind, pessimistic portraits suited this gritty and edgy ethos in magazines. According
to Sontag, art that was a “self-willed test of hardness” became popular among “sophisticated
urban people” (1977, p. 40). As John Szarkowski, the long time director photography at the
Museum of Modern Art, notes, photography up until the 1960s was preoccupied with a sort
of visual athletics in order to make the picture look classically beautiful (Musilli and Chodorov,
1972). Avedon and Arbus captured the intellectual spirit of the 1960s by deviating from these
artistic proscriptions, stripping away the fanciness of the traditional portrait. The new editorial
vision and cultural shift encouraged Avedon and Arbus to venture into places they feared and
confront subjects considered impolite or inappropriate for the “civilized” art of photography. As
Arbus’s daughter Doon puts it, “photographing had enormously to do with discovering what
prohibitions didn’t apply” (Ibid.).

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Diane Arbus’s magazine assignments were fundamental to establishing her distinctive
style and her reputation as a professional photographer (Southall in Arbus, 1984). Each story
allowed Arbus to explore new themes, meet new people, and develop her technique. Magazine
assignments “extend[ed] her range by forcing her to adopt or invent new techniques to fulfil
the task” (Arbus and Israel in Arbus, 1984, p. 5). Her keenest clients included the Sunday
Times Magazine and Nova, two London publications that enthusiastically supported her vision.
Assignments also came from New York, Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times,
Sports Illustrated, Show, Esquire, and Essence. Arbus’s first magazine assignment as an independent
photographer was a portfolio for Esquire titled “The Vertical Journey.” In the magazine’s special
issue dedicated to New York, “The Vertical Journey” revealed a varied assortment of lives in
the city. The series included a photograph of Hezekiah
Trambles, “The Jungle Creep”; Mrs. Dagmar Patino,
a pretty socialite; and ended with a direct and sombre
image of a cadaver’s feet in a morgue. Arbus clearly
chased similar subjects in her ‘serious’ photography, as
she did in her magazine work, including the abnormal,
the morbid, and the grotesque. In Arbus’s editorial
work, the line between fine art and mass media was
increasingly blurred; some of Arbus’s unpublished
magazine projects are commonly regarded as her
personal work, as the distinction is so unclear (Arbus
in Arbus, 1984, p. 5). Photographs taken at a nudist
camp, which Esquire declined, were included in her
first show at the Museum of Modern Art, “New
Documents.” According to Southall, “she appears to
have drawn no easy distinction between her approach to an assignment and her approach to a
project of her own” (Ibid., p. 152).
Avedon, conversely, consciously and conspicuously moved away from his commercial
work since he considered himself primarily a portrait photographer2 . Regarding his transition,
Avedon said, “Fashion is constantly taking and dealing with the surface of things and that doesn’t
attract me anymore” (in Wisniak, 1984). However, he acknowledged fashion as a “necessary
part of my commercial existence…It underwrites and supports my life and other work that

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I prefer to do” (Ibid.). Moreover, many of
Avedon’s most famous and influential works
came from his magazine assignments as a
fashion photographer. His early work for
Harper’s Bazaar under the guidance and
tutelage of the legendary art director Alexey
Brodovitch was revolutionary. Brodovitch
refused the “tedious” dichotomy between the
photographer who makes his or her money
selling dresses and perfume and the ‘serious’
artist who survives only on “meagre returns on books” and grants (Livingston in Avedon, 1994, p.
23). From the passionate art director, Avedon learned that “commercial or editorial (as opposed
to personal, or “purely artistic”) creative endeavours need not be undertaken in a spirit of negative
categorization or self-imposed drudgery” (Ibid.). This ideology freed Avedon to manage the
balance like his slightly older colleague and rival Irving Penn. Like Arbus—and despite his
insistence that fashion photography is uninteresting for him, viewers and critics would be hard
pressed to find fault in Avedon’s commercial work; Avedon brings his “addiction to perfection”
to most all his work3 . Avedon’s photographs “Dovima and the Elephants” (1955) and “Woman
in the Mirror” (1949) are canonical works when considering the American photography of the
twentieth century (Whitney, 1995).
Avedon was a magazine staff photographer
for his entire career. To simply disregard the
photographer’s magazine images as commercial work
with no artistic merit, one overlooks a tremendous and
varied body of work. Avedon’s career began in the late
1940s when he was noticed by Brodovitch and hired
by Harper’s Bazaar, where he worked until 1965. In
1966, he assumed a post at Vogue for twenty-two years.
His aforementioned artistic departure from fashion
photography fostered new purpose in his work with
magazines. Somewhere in the transition from fashion
photographer to fine art photographer, Avedon’s

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editorial work for magazines took on more sober tones, which were sometimes politically tinged.
In 1976, Rolling Stone assigned Avedon with the task of documenting the campaign trail in the
post-Watergate election. The result, named “The Family,” was a seminal portfolio of 73 portraits
composing Avedon’s idea of the American political leadership4 . From 1982-1992, Avedon’s
editorial work appeared exclusively in the French magazine Egoïste. Dyer writes, “It was inevitable
that, despite his undimmed energy and enthusiasm, Avedon succumbed to a kind of rote. In his
last years, as photographer for The New Yorker, he sometimes seemed to be running on empty. He
never lost the appetite for discovery but he kept discovering the same thing” (in Avedon, 2007,p.
52). However, the work maintained the remarkable Avedonian vision, and limned more of his
revelatory version of the world—which was both luminously bright and morbidly shadowy.
Richard Avedon’s work can simultaneously portray the ebullience and the cruelty of the
human condition. His pictures have impressive clarity, showing striking details; subjects appear to
be in the flesh. Apart from fashions, there are few clues in Avedon’s portraits that tell when they
were composed. In the Avedonian universe, Björk and Janis Joplin are contemporaries. Beautiful
people remain beautiful forever and the old and ravaged, the sick and poor are forever trapped in
their miserable condition. Avedon’s treatment of human physiognomy encapsulates the existence
of inconsistent forces within one person. Avedon looks for contradiction in the face—elements
that are conflicted but connected. For instance, all his portraits show that the sitter was a willing,
consenting participant in his photograph but they are expose the discomfort, the nervousness
and frustration of being turned into an image (Gade in Avedon, 2007, p. 133). His portraits of
Bert Lahr as Estragon in Waiting for Godot and Oscar Levant, portray performers in the most
genuinely anguished states. The feeling of agony Avedon imparts in his portraits has a great deal
to do with his aesthetic decisions. Avedon almost always shot photographs “in studio,” creating
the illusion of a stylized interior shot with the use of a portable white, seamless screen indoors
and outdoors. The white background removes the subject from the world put also betrays the
necessary presence of the photographer. His signature graphic style isolates the subject, lending
him or her existentialist sensibilities, as if “in relation to a void” (qtd in Dubiel, 1989, p. 19). As a
result, his sitters were symbolically isolated from the world. “What Avedon’s white-background
portraits offer is not flat reportage,” Gopnik says, but Expressionist portraiture in which “the
bodily grimaces, the charged voids and bare backgrounds, all impose shared states of being” (in
Avedon, 1994, p. 133). In other words, the universal human experiences of mortality, aging, and
loneliness were offered in his sitters’ individual performances.

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Opposing tendencies are
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also at work in the photographs of
Diane Arbus. Arbus balanced the
artlessness of the snapshot with the
contrived personalities of her sitters.
Unlike Avedon, Arbus, known for her
stark, documentary-style, black and
white portraits of “freaks,” worked
almost exclusively as a field reporter,
collecting images from the world.
Arbus portrayed her subjects as part of
the world by photographing them in
their natural surroundings—whether
that was a dressing room or bedroom.
These “private” locations are prominent in Arbus’s work as they were locations that connoted a
sense of intimacy with the subject, granting the photographer the status of an “insider.” Her
simple, unembellished, and direct style connoted a sense of unflinching directness. In turn, Arbus
developed an anti-aesthetic which resonated with the popularity of cinema verité of the 1960s.
One of Arbus’s only photographs without people, “A lobby in a building, NYC 1966,” frames a
scenic landscape, which is bluntly exposed by a barely visible electrical outlet and incongruous
meeting of the image in the corner of the room as a wallpaper façade. Revealing masks and
falsity—but not necessarily purging them—proved to be a thematic tie among Arbus’s works.
An element of performance consistently appears: Arbus photographed colonists at a nudist camp
assuming the stances of a family posed for an annual portrait, young parents dressed as movie
stars, and drag queens and kings in varied stages of dress for performance5 .
Issues of performance and truth, even in the mendacious decade of the 1960s, were of
little concern to Avedon and Arbus. Editors rarely assigned either photographer to cover eventfocused,
time-sensitive stories in the traditional photojournalistic sense in which the zenith is a
kind of neutral objectivity. More commonly, Avedon and Arbus were asked to illustrate profiles.
Portrait assignments gave the photographers time to massage their subjects into just the right
pose and expression; Laura Wilson, Avedon’s long-time researcher and assistant, calls Avedon’s
photographs “studied works of the imagination” (2003, p. 47) 6 . The only objectivity Arbus or

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Avedon presumed to offer was openly
coloured by their own biases. Rejecting
the formal properties of a conventional
portrait, Arbus and Avedon often created
unflattering, unforgiving images of their
subjects. For example, Avedon’s much
discussed portraits of Dorothy Parker and
Isak Dinesen often elicit criticism towards
the unnecessary cruelty of the his ‘shots.’
His representations of these women offer
no benevolence when showing the ravages
of age, experience, and greed. Furnished
by their astute observation, Arbus and
Avedon’s portraits imparted serious commentary to match the frankly subjective prose of the
essays and features they were paired with. Still, the indexical nature of the photograph maintained
the illusion of a spontaneous snapshot in spite of the formal staging involved. Their resulting
photographs leave very little for viewers to draw their own conclusion while concealing the artists’
mediation; it is as if the images were specimens organically collected from the world.
Kozloff (2007) aligns both photographers in the tradition of German photographer
August Sander7 . Made mostly in the 1920s and ‘30s, People of the Twentieth Century was Sander’s
masterpiece a photographic typology of German society, including more than 1,800 images.
Says Kozloff, “In Sander’s classifying tone, [Arbus and Avedon] saw the prototype for a mock
anthropology of their own” (p. 199). The mentally ill, the victims of war, and the disgustingly rich
were fair targets of their cameras’ aim. Arbus envisaged her photographic project like “picking
flowers. Or Noah’s ark. I can hardly bear to leave any animal out” (Lee, 2003, p. 21). Arbus
photographed public faces and celebrities but the core of Arbus’s work depicts the marginalized
and those who were not sought out or valued by society. The final words in Arbus’s monograph
state: “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean its
very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody
would see unless I photographed them” (1973, p. 15). Avedon performed a similar task by
complimenting his portraits of the accomplished and famous with his masterpiece exhibition
and book In the American West (1985), which portrays the poor and working class west of Texas.

Newsstand Memento Mori • 10
“It’s been important to me my whole life,” Avedon said, “to hang on to things that other people
would throw in the trash can” (Whitney, 1995). Avedon and Arbus’s statements position their
photography as part of a project to collect, document, and consequently, preserve.
How Arbus and Avedon approached their work with such similar intentions can perhaps
be illuminated somewhat by examining the parallel trajectories of their lives; professionally and
personally, their paths crossed strikingly often. Avedon and Arbus were both born in 1923 in New
York City to department store families. Their careers as photographers began while working for their
parents’ respective businesses. As a result, both photographers’ first clients were from the fashion
industry8 . As professionals, Avedon and Arbus’s depended greatly on commercial assignments
from major national magazines to finance their personal work. Most saliently, Avedon and Arbus
were connected by their relationships with Marvin Israel, an influential painter, art director,
teacher, and graphic designer, who designed books, exhibits, and portfolios for both artists. Israel
was Arbus’s lover and colleague, and Avedon’s friend and collaborator. Close in age, Avedon and
Israel were engaged in a fraternal, mutually respectful, and often rivalrous relationship at Harper’s
(Gopnik in Avedon, 1995). Additionally, upon Arbus’s first show at the Museum of Modern
Art, Israel invited Arbus to lead master classes seminars in Avedon’s studio. Linked by Israel,
it is likely that Avedon and Arbus might have maintained their mutually supportive friendship
throughout their lives. However, Arbus’s inspired career was abruptly ended by her suicide in
1971. Avedon’s career, conversely, lasted six decades; the octogenarian photographer died while
on location for The New Yorker in San Antonio, Texas in 2005. Regardless, a collaborative spirit
between the two photographers was maintained throughout Avedon’s life, as he was a friend,
colleague, and mentor, to Doon and Amy Arbus, Diane’s daughters.
In addition to their many connections, critics and scholars would be remiss to ignore the
Jewish cultural identity of both Avedon and Arbus and its impact on these artists. Arbus spoke
at length about the impact of her Jewish identity on her worldview. In an interview with Studs
Terkel in Hard Times, (under the pseudonym Daisy Singer) Arbus said, “I never knew I was
Jewish when I was growing up. I didn’t know it was an unfortunate thing to be. Because I grew
up in a Jewish city in a Jewish family and my father was a rich Jew and I went to a Jewish
school, I was confirmed in a sense of unreality” (qtd in Lee, 2003, p. 28). For the photographer,
finally accepting the ‘otherness’ of Jewishness—which took on intensely horrific tones after the
Holocaust—(problematically) confirmed a lineage of suffering and ‘authentic’ being. Avedon, on
the other hand, recalled how his father “suffered terribly as a Russian Jew in New York” at the turn

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of the century, abandoned by his father and sent to an orphanage (Wisniak, 1984). In the early
part of the century, Jewish immigrants were subjected to extreme prejudices and endured great
poverty. Consequently, Avedon said his father “had a tragic quality and an exaggerated sense of
danger” (Ibid.). His father’s resulting alienation and isolation has always impacted Avedon’s work
(most visibly in his portraits of his dying father). Avedon and Arbus’s identification as Jewish
Americans situates them within a traumatic history.
Admittedly, it is precarious to assert any claim that Arbus’s and Avedon’s cultural-religious
identity makes itself explicitly visible in their photographs. Little critical writing thus far does
not support this assertion9 . However, one can trace fixation with death and suffering in Jewish
American art back to the collective experience and traumatic memory of the Jewish diasporic
experience; the connection is rather crude, but also critically supported (see Hirsh, 1996 and
Hussyen, 2003). As Adorno (2003) states, “The concept of a resurrecting of culture after Auschwitz
is illusory and senseless, and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is
forced to pay a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise, it needs art as
its unconscious chronicle” (p. xvi). I do not wish to push this interpretation too far and interpret
either photographer’s artwork as a response to the horrors of the concentration camps. But a claim
to the existence of traumatic memories and collective, ethnic-cultural identities substantiates a
claim linking Avedon and Arbus’s Jewish heritage with the frequent representation of mortality
and human suffering as a theme in the photographers’ work10 . Moreover, it imbues the possibility
that the photographers saw their work as embedded within a consequential and painful history.
The thought can be extended further to suggest that the post-war American photographers’
sense of history was profoundly affected by death, a subject which is central in Barthes’ meditation
on photography, Camera Lucida. For Barthes (1981), its finitude makes the photograph the
“denatured theater where death cannot ‘be contemplated,’ reflected and interiorized…[it] excludes
all purification, all catharsis” (p. 90). The photograph is not analogical or coded; it is “violent” in its
ability to fill “sight by force” (Ibid. p. 91). It authenticates what is shown as what-has-been. While
absolutely arresting a moment, Barthes states, every photograph is occupied by Death because
it shows the passing of time. If history is love’s protest, then the photograph is death’s constant
protest against history. Historical photographs, which the pictures of the late Avedon and the late
Arbus inevitably are, proclaim “death in the future” (Ibid., p. 96). One looks at Avedon’s portrait
of William Casby, a descendant of slaves, and understands “the essence of slavery” (Ibid., p. 34);
the geography of his face reveals the severe hardships of those passed. The image is filled with

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death: his ancestors are dead, and though Casby is alive in the picture, he is dead in the present.
Again, each historical photograph is inscribed with death anterior to our time and posterior to
the moment captured (that is dead and that is going to die). Says Barthes, “Whether or not the
subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (Ibid, p. 96). Accordingly, he charges
Avedon and Arbus guilty of a kind of murder: “All those young photographers who are at work in
the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
This is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly ‘alive,’
of which the Photographer is in a sense the professional” (p. 92). Avedon agreed fully; he said,
“[Photography] literally stops something dead. It is the death of the moment” (Whitney, 1995).
As death is eternally and unavoidably present in a photograph and asks the viewer to be mindful
of it; the photograph is, in other words, a momento mori work.
This assertion holds particular truth in regard to the work of these two photographers. Not
immune to their social and political surroundings, the violence of the Civil Rights movement and
the Vietnam and Korean Wars—and more recently, the Iraq War—are reflected in Arbus and
Avedon’s photographs. They are not literal representations necessarily11 , however they translate
the violence of the age visually. As previously stated, Avedon and Arbus’s portraits leave little to
the imagination, forcefully and unforgivingly handing the viewer the photographers’ truth. The
frontal poses of many of their images aggressively betray everything—the ugliness of society,
the ravages of age, and transience of youth. These photographers used the faces of their sitters
to express their interpretations of “death.” Ignoring the obvious implication of death in Arbus’s
biography (again, see endnote 12.), there are two significant representations of death in the
magazine work of these American photographers: firstly, a predominant theme in Arbus’s work
is the death of the family. The notion of the family had changed a great deal with the rest of the
American political and social landscape. The increased divorce rate finally exposed what a flawed
institution family could be. Arbus’s personal life witnessed these broad trends. Her commercial
work explores the American family as less constricting territory while still mourning the loss of
the Cold War consensus of “family.” The “death of the family” in Arbus’s work is figurative but
Avedon’s work it is literal. The deaths of his sister and father echo in his fashion photography
and portraiture. His past work in these respective genres comes together in his essay for The New
Yorker, “In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort,” in which Death literally becomes a part
of the family.
Magazines that commissioned Diane Arbus’s work reflected a larger change in values

Newsstand Memento Mori • 14
and ideology of the American middle class, specifically regarding the family institution. The
magazine was the location for a continuing conversation about a changing social landscape. For
Lee, “Arbus’s shift to the socially and cultural off-centre in the 1960s was …coincident with a
larger reorientation of the previous equation between family and consumer identities” (2003,
p. 26). Between 1946 and 1956, Arbus owned a successful fashion photography business with
her husband Allan. Photographs by the Arbuses for commercial advertisements conveyed “ a
singular middle-class family life of social and political conformity,” nurtured by unrestrained
consumption and material wealth (Lee, 2003, p 26). In Arbus’s photographs, the family was a
source of anxiety, loss, isolation, and inauthenticity. For example, Arbus’s best known image, “A
Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, 1970” clearly illustrates the family as a socially
constructed group of disparate parts: the photograph’s hero uncomfortably gazes down at his
bewildered mother and his aloof father. Though biologically unconnected, Arbus’s photographs
suggest, “freaks” could form more convincing families, having shared the experience of being
outsiders: Arbus’s “Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th street, NYC 1963” pictures
three friends so similar in their appearances they impart a familiar familial domesticity.
Critics have interpreted the provocative nature of Arbus’s work as a reaction to her alienation
from her family and family life in general (Lee and Pultz, 2003) 12 . Diane Arbus (née Nemerov) was
born on March 14 to Gertrude and David Nemerov. David was the merchandising director and
part owner of one of the city’s premier
fur emporia, Russek’s13 , founded by
Gertrude’s father, Frank Russek. The
Nemerovs were a wealthy family
who lived on the large apartments on
Central Park West and Park Avenue.
They travelled to Europe often, where
they immersed their children in the
world of fashion and art. Often busy
with work, the elder Nemerovs are
frequently characterized as selfabsorbed
and frequently absent. In a
contentious and singular biography by
Patricia Bosworth, the author depicts

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Gertrude as a depressed and uninvolved mother; David, on the other hand, appeared to Diane
as always “putting on a front” (in Schultz, 2005, p. 117). Speaking of her father’s passing in an
interview with Studs Terkel, Arbus said:
It’s true I didn’t really adore him [but]… I was really sort of awful when he died in
the way that I watched. I stood in the corner of the room almost like a creep…I was
just spellbound by the whole process. The gradual diminishment was fantastic. People
really get to look like nobody, or just like somebody, you know what I mean? …And I
photographed him then which was tremendously cold. (2003, p. 166)
Thus, photography was a means to confront family (her own and in general), its flaws
and its fractures. Critics Lee and Pultz (2003) assert family as the overt focus of Arbus’s artistic
awareness in her final years, especially in her assignments for Esquire, where she continually
presented the family as a fiction. Says Pultz, between 1963 and 1971, “one sees Arbus dealing
with family more and more explicitly, its structure and dissolution” (p. 10). For her final project,
one that remained incomplete at the time of her death in 1971, Arbus looked to create a “family
album” by assembling pictures of people who had never met in a narrative structure. Accordingly,
Arbus called into question the ritual of assembling a domestic history in an album. Like a family
member, she would often photograph celebrities in their bedroom such as Mae West, Brenda
Frazier, and Marcello Mastroianni. In her seemingly effortless replication of portraits that might
fit in a family album, Arbus troubles the intimacy one would traditionally relate with such
photographs.
In the Esquire editorials “Familial Colloquies” (1965) and “The Nelson Family” (1971),
Arbus frames family as nothing more than an edifice. In the former, Arbus matched public
figures with their children. Though all parent/child couples were physically touching, one detects

Newsstand Memento Mori • 16
a wide spectrum of closeness (Pultz, p. 14). One on end of the continuum, Ogden Reid and
his son Stewart sit uncomfortably on the arms of a chair in the living room. Ogden reaches
uncomfortably to put his arm around his son. Whatever pretences put forward, Arbus’s perspective
exposes the falsity of his gesture. Against this image of family, Sculptor Richard Lippold and
his daughter Tiana are pictured suggestively. With her arms wrapped around her father’s waist,
Tiana’s physical maturity makes a provocative implication of a sexualized relationship, which
is only disambiguated by Arbus’s captions. In her sitting with Ozzie, Harriet, Ricky and David
Nelson—America’s radio and television family, Arbus’s portraits hinted that the model family
was as troubled and confused as the rest of the population.
Arbus’s idea of the American family is most explicitly stated in “Two American Families,”
a feature for the Sunday Times Magazine of London. The spread included just two photographs
for which Arbus wrote two extended captions. On the left hand column, Arbus featured “A
young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, NYC 1966,” a photograph of Richard and
Marylin Dauria and “two of their three children” (Arbus, 1984, p. 106). Arbus writes, “the family
is undeniably close in a painful, heartrending sort of way” but the closeness is absent in the
photograph. First of all, their third child is missing from the photograph, troubling the Arbus’s
claim of the family’s closeness. But even without Arbus’s caption, one can detect a disconcerting
sadness in the photograph. The parents and their youngest child, in their Sunday best, look
desperately towards Arbus’s camera, as if pleading for her sympathy. Only their developmentally
disabled son, Richard Jr., is completely indifferent, or possibly oblivious, to the conventions
associated with having one’s photograph taken; his eyes point to something out of the frame, his
mouth agape, and his body positioned as if ready to leap out of the picture. This young Brooklyn
family, despite their best efforts, denies the normative notion of a happy family. This meaning is
even more pronounced in the accompanying photograph of Nat, June, and Paul Tarnapol. Like its
companion image, parts of the Tarnapol family—two other children—are left out of the picture.
The photograph, commonly known as “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, NY
1968,” shows a Marilyn-Monroe-type blond sunbathing beside her husband, whose hand over his
eyes snubs Arbus’s gaze. This upper middle class couple is not only unconcerned with the camera,
but also their four-year-old son, Paul, who struggles with a plastic pool in the background. Arbus
wrote about the photograph, “I think it’s such an odd photograph…the parents seem to be
dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them.” Arbus’s picture of the American
family is obsessed imperfect, incomplete, and fading.

Newsstand Memento Mori • 17

Newsstand Memento Mori • 18

Newsstand Memento Mori • 19
Avedon’s vision of the family is consumed by mortality. Like Arbus, Avedon also
photographed his dying father. One of his most famous series of portraits captures the cancerstricken
Jacob Israel Avedon between 1969 and his death in 1973. The portraits, which Sontag
famously declared “elegant [and] ruthless” (p. 105), unapologetically pronounce “the signs of
nascent demise.” His father looks pleadingly in the camera in most every photograph in the
series, as if asking the younger Avedon for mercy. Nonetheless, Avedon pushes on, forcefully
imposing an alarming representation of his father’s fading presence. Says Kozloff, “Avedon is
attracted to age not as an opportunity to reflect on its experience but to display its bodily ravages.
His maximum contrast light—and printing—emphasize every speckle and blemish and brown
spot human flesh like spoiling fruit” (p. 194). Sadly, the images of his father are reminiscent of his
disturbing images of the Italian catacombs and Vietnamese napalm victims. By aestheticizing old
age in a photograph, Avedon attempts to ward away his father’s inevitable demise by seizing what
is left of his father’s life. Moreover, the portrait sittings, according to Avedon, were a means to get
closer to his father, to reconnect with the person who taught him the physics of photography. In
many interviews, Avedon has spoken about a difficult relationship with his father (Rose, 2008;
Wisniak, 1984). But the endeavour to preserve life or their relationship is, of course, futile—he
reveals how close to death his father already is, and how far apart they are emotionally with the
sterile formality of the pictures.
The death of another family member also profoundly affected Avedon’s work: his sister
Louise, who spent the latter part of her life in a mental institution and passed away at the age
of forty. From its most primitive beginnings, Louise was a part of Avedon’s photography. In his
famous essay, “Borrowed Dogs,” Avedon remembers taping a photograph negative to his skin as
a child. After spending the day at the beach, an image of his sister was sunburned onto his body.
Louise modelled in his first photographs, which served as the prototypes for earliest published
fashion photographs. In one of rare instances Avedon spoke at length about his sister, he said:
Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn. were brunettes
and had fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister. My sense
of what was beautiful was established very early through the way in which I experienced
her. (Wisniak, 1984).
Since they were for his commercial clients, Avedon’s fashion photographs are mostly
effervescent and full of movement. But in view of his family tragedy, they are imbued with
desire—for that which never was and can never be. Here, I call upon Barthes again to suggest

Newsstand Memento Mori • 20
that these ‘family photographs’ “tell of death in the future”; the models appear intensely lively
while also signifying the sister who no longer exists.
In 1995, Avedon collaborated with Doon Arbus, Diane’s daughter, in a spectacular portfolio
of twenty-three colour photographs, which link fashion with the macabre. “In Memory of the
Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort” is a story of a family in a post-apocalyptic world; “things have fallen
apart. And they only have a strange memory of what things used to be like” (Avedon in Rose,
2008). In the photographs, the title characters are played by a human skeleton and model Nadja
Auermann, both wearing fashions by contemporary avant-garde designers. The coexistence of
Auermann’s vital body and the pallid Mr. Comfort is a thinly veiled metaphor for the marriage
of life and death in the world. Mr. Comfort convincingly plays the part of the father, wearing
fashions to match Auermann’s clothing, and sharing in a lustful marriage. Though one is alive and
the other is lifeless, they are considered to be completely similar. In one photograph, Auermann
looks into a shard of a mirror held up by Mr. Comfort. The jagged edges of the mirror yield
a partial reflection in which the viewer sees half of Mrs. Comfort’s face. Her image is joined
seamlessly by Mr. Comfort’s visage in the background. In this vanitas-like photograph, not only
does Avedon suggest the connection between death and life, he also aligns the photograph—
the reflection—with death. Even the young and beautiful in these photographs is very much
mortal.
In these photographs, Doon Arbus and Avedon appear to be recovering the unfinished
work of Diane Arbus, as if in homage to Arbus’s unfinished “family album.” This is an epic
collection of images that depict the traditions and ceremonies that American families partake
in: taking family photographs, watching television, housekeeping, and religious worship. The
photographs could be interpreted as a realization of Arbus’s intentions, as she described them in
her application for the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962:
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present…While we regret that
the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, it innumerable
inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebody’s
grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful…These are
our symptoms and our monuments. I want to simply save them, for what is ceremonious
and curious and commonplace will be legendary. (Arbus, 2003, p. 41)
And the “considerable ceremonies” are legendary Avedon’s eyes. They take on cinematic proportions
in these photographs. Moreover, like Arbus, Avedon is careful not be too sincere or credulous;

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there is an impression of irony and criticism in his representation of family life.
Three photographs in “In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort” relate specifically
to the family structure. In the image that opens the story, the title characters are posing for
a self-portrait. Mrs. Comfort wears in dramatic orange gown while a baby doll whose head
is fractured dangles from her right hand. Seated at her feet, Mr. Comfort sports a suit and
smart-looking fedora; in his hand, he holds a cable release for a broken, old-fashioned camera,
which stands facing the family. The image is more than a family picture because it also reveals its
construction (which also suggests another camera, out of the frame, which created the picture). It
unequivocally announces the farcical and artificial quality of their act, and their unabashed vanity.
Later in the story, Mrs. Comfort nurses the baby doll at her breast, while Mr. Comfort embraces
his wife from behind. Of all the images, this photograph most ostensibly connotes domestic
harmony. However, the sincerity and innocence of the emotion is undermined by Mrs. Comfort’s
ostentatious outfit, the clumsy position of their lifeless “child,” and their clichéd pose. At the
critical moment in the narrative, their attempts to live as they used to before the world ended
are completely ruined when a hurricane strikes. All the accessories to their bourgeois life—a

ox of laundry detergent, a phone, a camera, dollar bills—are strewn as the wind tears through
their home. As Mr. and Mrs. Comfort try to defy the storm, their child is forgotten, even as its
head crashes into a metal cupboard. Everything in this picture is impermanent and vulnerable
to destruction. Their wealth, their happiness, their family. In the end, all that remains is their
grief. Their loss inspires profound suffering and in the end, defeats the family. In the final image,
Mr. Comfort sends Mrs. Comfort away into the outdoors, and she returns his scorn with fearful
emotion. Her evocative expression suggests trepidation about her future, a yearning to restore the
past, and the fragility of their domestic unity.
Avedon once wrote, “Death is a young poet’s romance, and an old man’s business” (2002, p.
4). He flies in the face of his own words with these photographs, which combine the business of
magazines, with the Romantic art of death. In this photographic fable, Avedon inventively brings
together motifs he has presented throughout his career: the death-like father, the fashionable
woman, the family portrait, history, art, performance, and spectacle. Like a danse macabre, Avedon’s
photographs remind the viewer of how empty the glories of earthly life are. However, they are not
dismissive of material things or the capitalist life; in fact Avedon glorifies the beautiful clothing
in a rare use of colour he reserved mostly for fashion photography. This narrative mourns the
inevitable demise of all things, and unlike his earlier work, it even acknowledges photography’s
inability to change this fact.
Closely examining two magazine assignments from Avedon and Arbus illustrates the
versatility of these photographers. Arbus and Avedon made their mark on photography by creating
explosive combinations of generic reportage, fashion, ethnography, and social commentary.
Says Kozloff, “In each instance, there had been a lucid recalibration of photographic culture
and its momentum, progressive for the time” (Kozloff, p. 199). Arguably, each progression and
development in their styles was transformative for the image-producing world. Undeniably,
the photographs produced a rich body of material in which to consider the last five decades of
American history and art. It was fortuitous that the golden age of magazines coincided with
the careers of these photographers, which made it possible for their exceptional voices to be
heard. In their early careers, Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon mastered the craft of seduction
and narrative fashion photography consistently requires. As a result, they consistently gained
the interest of readers. Throughout their careers, their awareness was directed towards telling
fictions, using the visible world to participate in the craft of storytelling. The stories inscribed
in their photographs transformed the way America looked. This assertion is twofold: Avedon
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Newsstand Memento Mori • 24
and Arbus’s work altered the imagined landscape of America and defined the perspective of
Americans. Their achievements are even more extraordinary considering the medium in which
they operated. Magazines offer images a lifespan of a month or a week before they are replaced
by newer, fresher images on the newsstand. In today’s image-saturated world, the photograph
seems to hold little currency. And yet, Avedon and Arbus’s images have endured, defying the
notion that the commercially produced image is momentary or disposable. Revisiting the lives
and works of Avedon and Arbus, one is often reminded that they too have passed. For smaller
artists, calling upon Shakespeare is perhaps trite, but for these artistic giants, I can find no words
more appropriate to conclude this discussion of art and mortality: “But you shall shine more
bright in these contents/ Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time/…/your praise shall
still find room/Even in the eyes lf all posterity/That wear this world out to the ending doom”
(Sonnet 55, 3-4, 10-12).

Newsstand Memento Mori:
Endnotes & Points of Interest
1 In spite of the autonomy editors gave their photographers, working within restricted format of the
magazine provided its own challenges. Advertising bracketed most any artwork and thus, magazines’
commercial demands placed restrictions upon what kind of material could be depicted. Though Arbus’s
work was sought-after because of its “unswerving directness” (Southall in Arbus, 1984, p. 155), editors
still placed the interests of the advertisers and readers ahead of the artist’s. For example, Arbus’s choice
for the March 15, 1970 cover of The New York Times Magazine Children’s Fashion supplement “A black
girl and a white boy about four years old holding hands” (1970) did not appear any where in the issue;
instead, the Times’ choice for the cover was a photo of a Waspish blond boy and girl.
2 Avedon maintained that his portraits and his fashion photography were not in opposition, but rather
different styles with disparate ends: “I don’t think one is at all a reaction to the other, which is a view
sometimes held about Penn, Arbus and myself: that the serious, or if you want, the “tragic” quality of
our portraits is a reaction to the artificial demands of fashion. I think there is a tendency to categorize
photographers with assumptions that would never be made of writers. If an author writes a comedy or
a tragedy and then an essay or is politically concerned, no on questions. No one asks why a philosopher
writes a novel or a poem, or why Picasso did ballet costumes. That generosity is not extended to fashion
photographers” (qtd in Wisniak, 1984).
3 A telling anecdote is given in Adam Gopnik’s profile of Avedon, “The Light Writer,” clearly
illustrating Avedon’s neurosis. Searching for a “fun” gift for a friend’s wife, Avedon and the friend seek
out an instant photo button maker in a Manhattan park. The button maker does his best work, taking a
picture of the friends and transferring the image onto a tin button. Money is exchanged and men walk
away, seemingly content. Moments later, they return as Avedon expresses his virulent and irrepressible
dissatisfaction with the portrait. In minutes, he pulls together an ad hoc photo shoot with models and
using a gray dumpster as a substitute for a white background. Avedon only allows the button maker to
release the shutter. At the result, Avedon exclaims, “Now that’s a picture!” (Avedon, 1994).
4 Avedon later repeated this assignment for The New Yorker in 2004 in his last and unfinished portfolio
“Democracy 2004.”
5 See: “A family one evening in a nudist camp, Pa.1965,” “A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday
outing, NYC 1966,” “A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, NYC 1966”
6 One of Avedon’s most famous quotations—and his standard response to his critics—clearly
Newsstand Memento Mori • 25

Newsstand Memento Mori • 26
establishes his relation to truth: “All photographs are accurate, none of them is the truth” (in Wisniak,
1984, p. 49).
7 Gopnik (1995) challenges this popular view, stating, “Avedon is not that American Sander but the
[ Julia Margaret] Cameron of the last half of the twentieth century—a maker of pageants on the lawn
rather than a recorder of life as it is” (115-116). Gopnik places Sander’s work higher than Cameron’s
in a spectrum of ‘documentary truth.’ However, this claim fails to recognize the formality of Sander’s
photographs, which are all posed with a stiffness that he commanded, just as Avedon demanded
spontaneity from his sitters. To Gopnik’s credit, perhaps, the scope of Avedon’s work is closer to
Cameron’s as she chiefly photographed individuals of status and prestige. (Avedon, 1994).
8 When Arbus’s husband Allan was enlisted in the army in 1942, she began taking photographs
to chart the progress of her pregnancy and clippings of photographs from magazines, including the
first shoots by Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar (Arbus, 2003, p. 130). With her interest in photography
intensely piqued and upon Allan’s return in 1946, the Arbuses establish a successful commercial fashion
photography business. Glamour, Vogue, and Seventeen are among their clients
9 Lee (2003) explores the frequency of Jewish American families in Arbus’s work as part of a 1960s
dialogue about its survival in a time when Jewish Americans had apparently successfully integrated (and
assimilated) into American society (pp. 28-32).
10 Exempting their fashion photography.
11 Nota bene: Avedon did in fact employ his photography to engage in issues of social justice and
topical subjects. He commented on the Civil Rights movement in his book Nothing Personal and
travelled to Vietnam to photograph victims of napalm attacks
12 In the book Diane Arbus: Revelations, the estate of Diane Arbus released a comprehensive
chronology detailing notes and letters from the Arbus archives. With Arbus’s notes and letters in hand,
it would be easy explain all the photographs away and the intentions and decisions behind them with
this history. Analyses such as Schultz’s (2005) use her suicide and expressive writings to position Arbus
as a Sylvia Plath-like martyr. However, as Goldman (1974) notes, “an assumption that where [Arbus]
chose to travel contributed to her death makes viewers look away from the art” (p. 30). Both positions
considered, the personal details of Arbus’s life tie her work to an artistic dialogue about the death of
common values and family, which I illustrate in this discussion.
13 It was significant in Arbus and Avedon’s view that they grew up as children of department store
owners. The usually reticent and private Avedon thought it worth noting in an interview with Adam
Gopnik, “Diane Arbus and I both came from department-store families” (in Avedon, 1995, p. 104).
This is something they also shared with Marvin Israel. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish
immigrants to the United States, especially New York City, made their living in the business of
selling clothes. Avedon’s father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. The
successful business was representative of the elder Avedon’s masculinity, and it was through the business
that Avedon learned that “a man is a provider or he is nothing” (Gopnik, 1995, p. 107). This gave the
young artist a great thirst to thrust his greatest energies into work (Rose, 2008). In 1974, Avedon told
Newsweek, “I think I’ve photographed every single day since 1945” (qtd. in Avedon, 2007, p. 22). In the
documentary Darkness and Light, Avedon’s son, John, remarks that although his father was never an
observant Jew, he certainly exhibited the stereotypical characteristics of Jewishness—difficult neurosis,
obsession with work, and constant anxiety (Whitney, 1995).

Newsstand Memento Mori:
Reference List
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Bryne, D. (2007). We are family [The genius of photography]. London: BBC Televsion. [video file] http://
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