On Not Being Photographed by Diane Arbus

By Marilyn J. Curry

I was 15 years old in the summer of 1965 and I spent most days hanging out in New York's Washington Square Park. The same park and the same summer that Diane Arbus was taking the pictures that would become part of the retrospective of her work that I was now visiting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"I knew these people," I say to my 23-year-old nephew as we stare at a photo of a couple. In the photo, they are named "a young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park." I know their names and the name of the unborn baby who came two months later at St.Vincent's Hospital. I look at the couple closely as they gaze out into the gallery, she with an impossibly well constructed beehive hairdo, and he with conked hair and a BanLon shirt. I am amazed at how familiar they are to me, more familiar than I am to myself from that time.

As we walk through the galleries, I feel an edgy sense of anticipation. Maybe she had photographed me, I wondered to myself. Maybe I was on some contact sheet. Most of the photographs from the summer of 1965 that I had seen were posed, consented portraits.
I hadn't consented.

Over the years I had thought of my encounter with Arbus and of her reputation for having photographed freaks. What would it be like to see myself at that time? Did she see me as a freak as well? I had a hard time making sense of that part of my life. What would it be like to see a picture of myself back then?

In the gallery, I watch other people look at the photos and try to imagine my picture.
I am 15 years old. But do I look older? I thought I did. I am wearing heavy eyeliner and mascara, and my wavy hair is ironed to make it straight like the Beatles' girlfriends. I have baby fat on my face, and next to me is my boyfriend. He has a full afro, dark skinned, with a gold tooth. He is 28 years old and probably high on cheap wine.
But that photograph wasn't taken. And, even as I try to remember, I know there are many details that are lost.

My nephew and I continue to look at the couple Arbus did photograph. The freckles on the woman's shoulder and the color of her maternity blouse-I couldn't have recalled them without the photograph-but even in black and white I can remember the lavenders and blues of the blouse and the pale cornflake color of the freckles on her chalk white skin. I danced with that woman on a warm afternoon in the park in July to a boom box playing the Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself." I laughed as her husband chided her, saying "The baby will come out funny if you keep moving around like that."

* * *

My nephew asks, "Were you on drugs?"

"No," I laugh. As I try to explain to him my time in the park, it has an almost bucolic sound.

"I met these people, they were nice to me...we would just pass the days sitting on the benches in the park."

Am I trying to clean this up? Protect him from the part of me that took risks? For him, who grew up in a much more protected world, it is probably unimaginable to be where I was as a young teenager.

* * *

I started taking the subway from Queens to Greenwich Village when I was 14 years old. An interest in folk music, a feeling of being different in my own neighborhood, and an older friend who would go along with my ideas got us there. We waited for a bus on the cold corners of our neighborhood streets, conspicuous in our newly bought trench coats and dark make-up. A short bus ride to the subway and a two-train ride to West Fourth Street and then the payoff, the ascent up the subway stairs. The world cracked open with possibilities on those streets. It was a grown-up world of record and book stores filled with culture and the exotic smells of incense, souvlaki and freshly roasted coffee.

We walked in our zipped up leather boots towards Macdougal Street past the corner newsstand that sold the Village Voice, and the jewelry stores where we had our ears pierced for the first time, to the basement of the Café Wha.

I was enthralled with the dark basement filled with church pews where we slowly sipped our hot apple cider with cinnamon. I can remember the rich sound of guitar chords being strummed, bringing to life songs I had only heard on records in my bedroom. And because we were young girls we were offered invitations, opportunities. We took chances. When Bobby, the tall, handsome Puerto Rican bouncer invited us to his apartment, we went.

We climbed to the fifth-floor walk-up, my girlfriend Linda, Bobby, and I. We entered his apartment, which was only a room with a bed covered with a fake tiger bedspread and a collection of machete knives on the wall. He took a bottle of cheap red wine out and Linda and I declined. We sat on his bed as he demonstrated his skill with the machete, slicing the air only inches from our faces. Linda and I both barely glancing at each other, eyeing the door, but never showing our fear.

Later we rushed down the cold street together to the subway, laughing at "that guy being out of his mind," but thrilled for having had the story, the adventure. That's who I was then.

* * *

In the late spring of 1965, the days were getting longer and our welcome had worn off at the Café Wha. Bobby stopped letting us in for free when we sat with the Trinidadian steel drummers in the back of the café. We ventured over to Washington Square Park.

The first time I walked into the park there was a man with a large afro, wearing a serape and carrying a carved stick sitting at the fountain in the center of the park. He stared at me and shook the stick and gestured for me to come over. I was intrigued but I didn't go.
But the next weekend when there was an outdoor art show, and lots of tourists, Linda and I went down to the park again. I walked closer to the man and he smiled and his gold tooth glistened in the sun.

From a distance Wig had appeared intimidating but up close it was clear that he was gentle and funny. He spoke quietly and asked Linda and I where we were from. He listened to me attentively. We began to go every Saturday and each time we saw Wig who would greet us and invite us to sit with him.

On these glorious spring days, sitting with Wig was a thrill; he was like the mayor of the park and he knew everyone. And Linda and I in our new leather sandals and cotton skirts reveled in a world that was so far from the bowling alleys of Queens and the make-out sessions with boys in the backseats of cars.

Although Wig's interest in us remained attentive, he also had another agenda; he was trying to make some money. He seemed to have a variety of hustles with the tourists. One involved having a sketch pad and offering to draw someone. Wig couldn't draw and most people declined. He would then ask for a quarter. After awhile Wig would have enough to buy a bottle of wine and we would leave the fountain and go across the park and sit with his buddies on the benches under the trees. We were away from the tourists and Linda and I were no longer onlookers. We were in the inner circle. Almost.

* * *

One weekend Linda and I stayed longer in the park than usual. It was after dark. It started raining and Wig and a group of us went under the arch. A wine bottle had been passed between Wig and the other guys. Wig and I were standing close to each other. Another guy, Sputnik, started cursing.

"Man, don't talk like that in front of the girls," Wig said.

A fight started between Wig and Sputnik. There were some blows and then suddenly Wig was bleeding, a cut on his face. I remember someone said, "Watch out, he has a blade."

Wig told me to get out of there. Linda and I ran. I heard a police car. We rode the subway home, dazed by the experience.

The next day was Monday. I had just turned 15. My life in my house with my mother and my older brother seemed unreal to me. My mother and I were fighting a lot. I was out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Linda, who was a couple of years older, had gotten a job. For the first time, I went to the park on a weekday by myself. I wanted to see Wig.

The park looked different during the week. The tourists thinned out and what was left were the hardcore regulars. It was a slightly scary world of butch lesbians, drugged-out runaway white youth, and Wig's group, which was mostly African-American guys, who were drinkers.

It was a warm early summer day and Wig was sitting on a bench by himself, but he was more withdrawn. It was probably the first time I had seen him sober. He had stitches in his cheek. He looked older than his 28 years. He reported that Sputnik got busted. He also said what Sputnik did was wrong. I said, "He shouldn't have cut you."

He said, "No, he shouldn't have talked like that in front of you."

At that point I felt myself cross over to Wig in a way that I had not experienced. With him I felt an intensity that was both scary and exciting. I like the way he smelled. It was a grown-up man smell, liked rolled tobacco. I began to go to the park almost every day.

As Arbus describes the park in the show's catalog: "...and in the middle were the winos. They were the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies."

I never left the first echelon that summer, nor did I want to. Wig's world was very intriguing. I was privy to conversations about Jim Crow laws, the Korean war, and ongoing humorous commentary about the passing tourists. At 15, the word wino meant nothing to me. Wig never really seemed drunk and he was warm and protective towards me. We sat on the benches together with his arm around me. He kissed me good-bye at the subway, and often we made out. But that was it. I am sure the other guys thought Wig was sleeping with me. But in reality, except for occasional hotel rooms in the Bowery, Wig was homeless. I also think he knew how young I was, and in many ways Wig was a gentleman.

* * *

Most days I would arrive in the park about 11:00 in the morning. I would walk past the lesbians, who would often greet me. Two of them are in the Arbus retrospective. Women in men's chino pants and white button-down shirts with slicked back hair. I remember both of them. One woman that Arbus did not photograph is etched permanently in my memory. She was really skinny with slicked back short red hair, freckles and underneath the man's shirt and the black chino pants was her swollen pregnant belly. The rumor in the park was that she had been raped. I never knew, but I remember thinking that she looked so vulnerable and incongruous. I remember feeling scared for her.

During that summer the couple in the photograph provided some sort of stability to Wig's group. Or at least she did. She was still working while her husband was in the park during the day. She would arrive around 4:00 pm, sometimes with a roasted chicken and some bread, and Wig and I and she and her husband would, as she called it, "dine." I often wondered about her. The whole Greenwich Village scene seemed to not impact her style. Except for being married to a black man, she looked more like women from my neighborhood in Queens-thick eyeliner, beehive hairdo that I had given up when I discovered bohemian dress, long, straightened hair and black tights, etc. I never asked her how her life had gone, the choices she had made. We were always too much in the moment and I was too young and unwilling to reveal any questions that might appear uncool.

But one woman, Maris, talked to me like I was an adult. She told me a story that fascinated me then, even now. She had an exotic appearance, a true "Village" person. She wore Moroccan scarves and smoked French cigarettes. Almost every day she would enter the park with Count, a stately, tall black man who always wore a fez, black sunglasses, and an overcoat, even in the summer. They would walk arm-in-arm into the park like royalty. I never knew how they lived. Did anyone have a job?

One day sitting on the bench, Maris told me a story of how she and Count had met, which involved a dream in which a man appeared to her and told her they would be together. The next day when she walked into the park she saw Count standing there and looking at her and she asked him, "Were you the man in my dreams?"

And when his response was positive she went home with him and had been with him ever since. I was amazed by her story and marveled at a woman who had made decisions based on her dreams.

I too had had a dream around that time that was very significant to me. I had dreamt that my father who had died when I was five and a half, from what I was told was a heart attack, had actually committed suicide. I shared this dream with Linda, who had grown up in my neighborhood and knew the secrets that were kept from me. She confirmed my dream and that confirmation, I believe, unsettled me and set me apart from my small neighborhood in Queens. The "truth" of my father's suicide and my capacity to dream the "truth" made me feel that I was different. I think these perceptions contributed to my identification with people in the park. I, too, felt set apart from the world.

It was during those weekdays that I remember Arbus watching me. She made eye contact and I noticed her. It was rare to see a woman alone. It was even rarer to see a woman with a professional camera around her neck. A cool looking woman with short hair, sandals, and a safari jacket. A woman who was clearly observing us.

I remember so called "straight" people, sometimes seeing me with Wig, like a policeman, or a straight white man walking by, and sometimes I could see the anger, the judgment in their eyes. I was used to shunning people who stared, tourist types, for example.

Even at 15 I knew Arbus was not a tourist, but she was staring. Because of that I felt she could see me. In many ways I didn't want to be seen by a woman older than me who in my mind was trying to make sense of who I was and what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't want anyone to ask me.

She approached me. I was walking into the park by myself. She stood about four feet from me. Under the arch of the trees the light was dappled. I have seen several of her portraits in this exact spot. She spoke softly but looked at me directly with her large eyes.

"Are you Jewish?" she asked.

I replied no, but I remember feeling somehow embarrassed. Sensing she was trying to place me. Maybe Jewish girls go out with black guys. I wasn't Jewish. What kind of girl was I? Could she see who I was? Was I being judged? I remembered that moment long after it happened.

I left the park at the end of that summer and went back to my junior year in high school. Linda and I still went to the Village on the weekends, but we met other people, joined different scenes. I saw Wig occasionally on the streets around the park. When he was reasonably sober we would talk, he would give me news about the people in the park. I brought him my brother's old pea coat that winter because I was worried he would be cold. But other times if he saw me walking with a man he would act crazy, shaking his stick and pretending to threaten me if I didn't come back to him, and I would cross the street to avoid him.

I remember seeing Arbus at other scenes in New York. A Be-In on Easter Sunday at Central Park in 1967. She didn't remember me. I didn't even know the word role model, but I knew no other women who were in the world the way she was and I was drawn to her.

Five years later I stood in a camera store in San Francisco, myself now a film student, and noticed a copy of Aperture that featured an article about Diane Arbus. Inside was a picture of her, the news of her suicide, and some photographs of people in Washington Square Park from the summer of 1965. I remember feeling the whole store recede into the background as I stared at the people I knew and thought about that woman who looked at me so intently.

I went back to the museum two more times by myself during the last week of the show. I had feelings not unlike the ones I had when I ascended the subway stairs to Greenwich Village for the first time. I was on an adventure. I had a desire to be alone with the photographs. And yet, even in the crowds I began to notice an odd sense of the privacy of each portrait, the agreement between Diane and her subject, the trust of the moment-a quality that came through the photographs over 30 years later.

And the more I looked at her photographs the more I wished she had photographed me when I was 15. Not to be famous, although, of course, there was some cachet, but more importantly to be seen.

I was no longer afraid of what she would have seen in me. In actuality, I longed for what she would have seen. Because in each photograph, from the middle-aged nudists sitting in their living room, to the screaming toddler with a dirty encrusted nose whose face fills the frame, to the couple in Washington Square Park that I knew, I saw Arbus's acceptance for who we are as human beings, our specific self, at a specific time. As I looked at the people looking back at us years later there were no freaks. All of her people were in good hands. I would have been in good hands, too.

Biography

Marilyn J. Curry was born and raised in Queens, New York. As a young woman she lived in Manhattan and attended CUNY before she left for San Francisco in 1971. There she received degrees in film, creative arts and clinical social work. In San Francisco, she is a writer and a mental health professional. She often visits her family in Queens.