← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Diane Arbus Turned Her Camera on New York
00:29:14
This summer, you can see the largest New York exhibition ever put together about local post-war photographer Diane Arbus.
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studio in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. Today's show is all about summer. We'll kick off our series of conversations about great beach reads with Laura Lippman. Her latest novel is Murder Takes a Vacation. All of It. Producer Jordan Loff will join us to talk about our summer reading challenge and want to hear what books you're excited to be reading right now. Plus, Vulture TV critic Catherine von Arendonck joins us to preview some of the summer's most anticipated new and returning shows. That's the plan. So let's get this started with some art. The exhibit is called Constellation. The most comprehensive exhibit of the work of photographer Diane Arbus is currently currently up at the Park Avenue armory. More than 400 prints are displayed in a show called Constellation, which lays out Arbus work in giant network of metal scaffoldings surrounding you in all directions with mirrors strategically placed. There's no beginning or end to the exhibition, no directions for how to move through it. Each viewer experiences the work of the prolific photographer in their own way. The exhibition comes just over 100 years after Arbus birth in New York City in March of 20th, 1923. Besides capturing all kinds of New York sites throughout her career, Arbus was also known for her unique subjects. These and lesser known photographs, some never before displayed, are also featured in the exhibition. Constellation runs now through August 17th. Joining me now are the show's creator, Matthew Humery. Matthew, nice to speak with you.
- [01:57]
Matthew Humery
Nice to meet you. Thank you.
- [01:59]
Alison Stewart
Also with me in studio is Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print Arbus photographs since her death. Welcome, Neil.
- [02:07]
Neil Selkirk
Hello.
- [02:08]
Alison Stewart
So Matthew, this is the most comprehensive study of Arbus work to date. What was the goal from the beginning?
- [02:17]
Matthew Humery
First, as it was like for the first time that I had the idea to show the entire photograph, the 454 images that Neil said Kirk printed. I thought like I should find a way to, to find a display how to present all these images together. And it was a kind of challenging and it took me some time to find out how to organize and to find the right idea of how to present this large body of work. So it was like, you know, I like to search a little bit and then at some point I've got the idea of like having this kind of insulation. And this installation, as you explained it very well, is not about having a classic show as a classic exhibition with organized within themes or chronologically order, or with any kind of order like this. So I wanted to find a way that the visitors will discover images in a way like Diane Arbus took pictures in the city, in New York, discovering people in the park or in the streets. So that was the idea. And that's how I had the, you know, like, this is how I wanted to do in order to. To create that show.
- [03:41]
Alison Stewart
Neil, what is your relationship to the pieces in this exhibition?
- [03:46]
Neil Selkirk
I made them. They. They are actually the printer's proofs of all of the prints that I made. And they just sort of, as I made them, they went into a box. And then at a certain point I had an awful lot of them. And at a certain point I was approached by Maya Hoffman and her foundation, and they bought them and did nothing with them for 10 years. And then out of the blue, in 2023, there was going to be this huge show in Arles in France, which showed them all, which was pretty daunting. Nothing like that had ever been done before.
- [04:31]
Alison Stewart
What did you think when this said, oh, we're going to show them all?
- [04:35]
Neil Selkirk
We were pretty horrified, meaning we couldn't imagine that anybody could show them all in a way that was comprehensible. And Dieren Abbas and I showed up in Arles in the summer of 23 and were completely staggered to be delighted and amazed that Matthia had succeeded in doing it.
- [04:57]
Alison Stewart
Matthew, when you think about the sheer size of the show, what does it provide the viewer that a smaller show wouldn't provide the viewer about Diane's work?
- [05:14]
Matthew Humery
It's more like the freedom of, like, discovering in your own way the picture. And if you have a small show or small, like a slightly more organized in a way, in a classic way, I think you just lose that. And I just thought that would be like, an opportunity for the viewer to experiment something different. I don't like so much the idea of, like, immersive, because it's not only immersive, it's just also like. It just give you the possibility of navigating the way you want and discovering things. And sometimes I've got some. Some remarks. Oh, sometimes we get. Some images were like, quite high. I cannot see them, so. But that's not really important in a way, you know, it's a. It's better not to see them, so not a nice way and to still to be able to see it. But then there is this way of, like, discovering again. And I think this is what I thought was very important for me.
- [06:15]
Alison Stewart
Neil, how did you meet Diane Arbus?
- [06:19]
Neil Selkirk
Oh boy. In 1968 I was still in photography school in London and I'd been told that the only way to really learn how to be a photographer was to go to New York and apprentice oneself to a photographer. And in the spring of 68, I came to New York on a student flight and wound up. One of the things that I got out of it was I became the sort of London second assistant for Richard Avedon and Hiro, the Japanese photographer who worked out of his studio. And later that summer Avedon was in London, I was working for him. And we were working in John Huston, the film director's house. We were photographing Angelica Huston and her mother and her brother. And we'd set up our white seamless background in their living room and we had time to kill. And I was just wandering around in the living room and there was just one photograph, one piece of flat art in this whole large living room. And it was a photograph of three naked people sitting on the grass with the back end of a car sticking into it. And I was completely devastated, absolutely devastated by this image. I have never before or since been affected by a work of art in that way. I literally considered running out the door. I was so horrified by it. And then we took the picture, took the seamless way and came, you know, I went home and Avedon came back to New York. And two years later I was. I had made my way to New York and I was living in Hero, the photographer's apartment in the Dakota, in the maids room and propped up against the wall was the same photograph. And I said, I saw that photograph in London. He said, it's by a woman called Diane Arbus, you'll probably meet her. And a few weeks later, sure enough, she showed up at the studio with Marvin Israel. And she was a friend of both photographers. And she had arranged with Hiro, who had received from Japan the first of a particular kind of camera, Pentax 6x7, that was in the United States. And she had asked if she could borrow it because she was seeking to change the format that she was working in and was exploring alternative cameras. And he said he would lend her this camera. It was the only one in the United States. And I was given the job of showing her how to use it. And she used it for a few weeks, decided she loved it and it was going to become available soon. But she didn't have any money, so she asked us if she held a class, would we come, this is the assistance in the studio. And then she eventually Put an ad in the New York Times and had a class at Westbeth, and we all went. She got the camera and she periodically would call me for technical advice because she was deeply inquisitive about how to get the results that she was interested in achieving. And she knew a bunch of people to call, and I was one of them. And that's how I got to know her.
- [09:46]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with curator Matthew Hemire and print developer Neil Selkirk about Constellation, the new exhibition of the work of photographer Diane Arbus. It's now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. Matthew, am I saying your name correctly?
- [10:00]
Matthew Humery
Mathieu Humery.
- [10:01]
Alison Stewart
Thank you. Thank you, Matthew. Diane Arbus was born in New York City. She lived here for much of her life. What does it reveal about Arbus to us as viewers? That she's a New Yorker and that she's a New York photographer.
- [10:21]
Matthew Humery
When we did the show in Arles first, the funny thing is, like all the New Yorkers, because there is a lot of people coming from New York here in south of France during the summertime, as there is a lot of festival, they, all of them, the artist show needs to come here in New York, needs to come to New York, because as a New Yorker, as a artist from New York, taking pictures in New York and taking New Yorker also as a picture that's. You just like. It doesn't make any sense not to show it in New York. So probably there is something like this. And I felt like, okay, we should find out a way to, you know, to bring and to take that show with all these images. Altogether, 454 images. Again, it's a lot of images. And then we've got this opportunity to. To present that at the Park Armory, which present all the characteristics we needed in order to. To present, you know, this huge volume of pictures. So, yeah, I think it's. It's. That's an artist from New York. She took a lot of pictures there. And it's like being, you know, like, you as a. As a. As a visitor, you. It's like walking in the street, like Central park or in Thompson park anywhere in New York. And then there is this kind of interesting parallel between the two, the two things, you being able to look at the show and all these images being in New York as well. So I think it's kind of beautiful to be able to do this.
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Alison Stewart
Neil Arbus's father was a businessman. He ran a fur emporium, I believe, and she started her early work taking pictures for him. When did she break out on her own as a photographer.
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Neil Selkirk
She actually never took the pictures. Her husband Alan took the photographs. She styled them.
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Alison Stewart
She styled them. That's interesting.
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Neil Selkirk
Yeah. So they had a business together. They were in the studio together. Alan took the photographs. She had always taken pictures. He gave her a camera. He went into the Pacific theater in the war, in the Second World War. He had given her a camera. She'd given him a camera. They were very interested in photography from the beginning. When she was a teenager. They were going to shows and so on. What was the question?
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Alison Stewart
Oh, well, that answered the question. It's interesting though, when you think about the family. Her brother's a Pulitzer Prize winner. Yes.
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Neil Selkirk
Yeah. He was the poet laureate of the United States. No. Yes. Her brother was not a Pulitzer Prize winning. Her brother was the poet laureate of the United States. He was a poet.
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Alison Stewart
It's so interesting that they grew up in that household.
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Neil Selkirk
Yeah, they were both really smart. They were super smart.
- [13:21]
Alison Stewart
Matthew, I want to talk about Diane Arbus process. The text accompanying the exhibition puts Arbus photography in the context of impressionist painters.
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Matthew Humery
Yes.
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Alison Stewart
Why is this a good place to understand her work?
- [13:37]
Matthew Humery
For two reasons. First, because when this show take place first, it was like in. In Arles. And the Arles is also like the city of Van Gogh. And Van Gogh, as you know, he make the paintings outside here in the country. And I like the idea of with the sun and having, you know, the idea of make the comparison with the painting. And at the time when the impressionist decided like to get out of the studio and to be, you know, to confront the reality, the cities or the countryside or outside big city like Paris or South of France, I thought it was like an interesting parallel. And then when, you know, when the show came here in New York, I reread it and I said maybe I might change this as this was more related to the first show. But then after I said at the end, that's the main thing. That's the same same thing. It's the same process. That's the same idea. It's just like not the same. It's a big city like New York. It's not. But it remained the same idea. So I decided like to maintain the text because I think that's kind of. It fits very well. And it was an idea of like to translate what some other artists before did. And this is also what she did. So I think it was a great, a great idea.
- [15:04]
Alison Stewart
Neil, you mentioned you worked with several photographers. What was unique about Arbus work?
- [15:14]
Neil Selkirk
I worked with several photographers And I never worked with Diane. I mean she never had an assistant. She always worked alone, completely alone for her own work. Ask the question again.
- [15:30]
Alison Stewart
Well, what was unique about what she was able to accomplish working on Malone?
- [15:37]
Neil Selkirk
She was maybe the best way to approach that is that one assumes when one is talking about deannarbis the photographer that the primary objective when she went out to take a photograph was to. Was the photograph. This is not necessarily the case. She was completely personally individually absorbed with the issue of what makes human beings tick. She primarily wanted to meet them. The photograph was an almost incidental product, a record of that meeting. So she would see someone in her. The box of 10, which is her iconic 10 photographs are the only ones that she ever put on the market. At least two of them I haven't been able to think of. The others were people she saw on the subway and approached said that she really liked the way they, I don't know what she said. Essentially approached them and said she would like to take the picture, go home with them and take their photograph. And they agreed to do that. And then she spent significant amounts of time with these people because she was fascinated by something about initially the way they looked and then she wanted to pursue what their life consisted of and try and understand that. And then she took a photograph and at one point she made this reference to her butterfly collection which was essentially the photographs were a record of the people she'd met. The photographs were facts. They were not attempts to do something artistic. They were a fact.
- [17:32]
Alison Stewart
A fact of the meeting, a fact of the conversation.
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Neil Selkirk
There was information in the photograph and that was what mattered.
- [17:41]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking to the curator Matthew Humery and print developer Neil Selkirk about Constellation, a new exhibition of the work of photographer Diane Arbus. It's now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. Neil, it is said you are the only authorized person to make prints of Arbus negatives since her death. How did you wind up in this position?
- [18:05]
Neil Selkirk
Completely by chance that I'm not basically a printer. I'm very much not a printer. Actually she's the only person I've ever made the prints for other than myself. Essentially I'm a photographer and I was. I'd been fired at Heroes in the summer of 1970 and I went to Europe on a. On a job working for a New York based photographer and having completed her course, this was 71, having completed her photography course that she held to pay for the camera. So I'm in Europe and I get word that Diane had killed herself and I immediately Wrote to Marvin Israel, who I knew would be involved, and said, if you're going to memorialize her in any way, I will be back in November and I would like to help. And when I got back to New York in November, you know, lo and behold, they were sort of waiting for me because I was out of a job, didn't need much to live on, and they wanted someone to do the research because it had already been decided with John Szarkowski, who was the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, that there would be a major retrospective in the fall of 72. And they needed somebody to find the pictures and print the pictures. And I just happened to be the guy. I just happened to be there.
- [19:33]
Alison Stewart
Really. It was a matter of place and time.
- [19:36]
Neil Selkirk
Absolutely.
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Alison Stewart
Wow.
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Neil Selkirk
And willingness, opportunity.
- [19:39]
Alison Stewart
Wow. Matthew, I want to talk a little bit about the arrangement of the exhibition. You call it a constellation. The photographers are spread throughout the space in a network of metal. There's sort of like a triangle in the middle and there are right angles at everywhere you go. Where did the idea for this layout come from?
- [20:02]
Matthew Humery
I was reading Chronology, which is a book with all the writings from the Ann Arbors. And I was in a subway reading that. And then at some point I went to Subway in New York. And then at some point I looked right in front of me and I saw the. The map of the. Of the subway. And I. I realized that there was a kind of synchronicity. And you gave me the idea, oh, that's how I should organize the show. Looking at the floor plan. And then, okay, I should translate that. I just like this idea and it comes from that. And then of course, I'd like to translate it with not like in a flat plans, but with, you know, as it is like high ceilings and you know, like the volume. This display should be like with this three dimensional aspect. So this is how I came.
- [20:57]
Neil Selkirk
So.
- [20:58]
Matthew Humery
And then I. When I explained the idea to. To the estate, we. We agreed that it would be more important and more nicer to organize this, to spread out all the different series she ever did and to kind of. If you, at some point you have a portrait, then you can place a double portrait. If you have a small format, then you can show a large, larger format. You know, that this kind of like in order to. To really not. To that. Not something who's not organized, but to spread it out as much as you can in order to get all the diversity of what she was able to do. The only. The only artwork who remained together as one thing Was like, hidden somewhere. It's the box of 10 photographs. That's Neil mentioned earlier. That's the only artwork she produce, as you know, before she committed a suicide and then she did that work. And that's so strong together. I wanted to place this in a way that it remained together in this display, but it's not really in the middle. You have to discover it. You do not realize where it is right away, but at some point then you realize that these ten photographs remain together. And I think it was kind of nice to keep that together for that reason.
- [22:35]
Alison Stewart
It is a bit of a hunt when you're. When you're in. It's funny, there was a. There's a mirror at the back. And this poor woman didn't really realize it until the guard was like, you're about to crash into the mirror lady.
- [22:48]
Matthew Humery
Yeah. In a way, you're part of the. It's a fragmented portrait, self portrait of her. A new part of it. Yes, that's the. That's. That's. That's the idea. I thought, like, this mirror, because it's not just like. Of course it's. It's interesting as. But it's also like the meaning of it is like really to. To show that all this picture, it's her and it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a portrait of her and you part of this portrait. And I think that was also the idea of, like, integrating, you know, the visitor part of the installation and part of, you know, the work. And you are like, part of that as well. So that was also the idea I.
- [23:33]
Alison Stewart
Was going to ask you because I think perhaps one of her most famous pictures is like the second to last on the list. It's like number 4:52, the identical twins from Rosendale, New Jersey. And you have to go searching for it and you find it in the corner. How did you think about placing the items?
- [23:53]
Matthew Humery
Oh, I didn't use any, you know, sketch or program on computer. I ask an architect to design the structures. So we installed them. And then I have been locked for 15 days, two weeks. And I started to place things one by one like this. The first three days was, like, kind of tough, I would say, because I saw that was an idea. But to translate this idea, maybe I, you know, I've been, You know, it might complicate. But then after. Then when I started to. You get the first. You know how you start. And then from the starting point, as soon as you get into the installations, and I start to. To look at more like on the side. And then. And then slowly he came around. And then, Then. Then things became very clear and I just, like, became like a machine, like installing things like this. And he came like, just like a painter when he start to. You know, sometimes it's just a starting process is a bit difficult. And then alone by itself, and then you know where to go. And then you get. Once you get the process, then you just repeat it again and again and again. And then you. Then at the end, you know, after two weeks, it was done like this.
- [25:14]
Alison Stewart
Neil, out of the photos which haven't been seen, which one do you like?
- [25:23]
Neil Selkirk
I can't answer that question because.
- [25:28]
Alison Stewart
At.
- [25:28]
Neil Selkirk
This distance, at this time, I couldn't possibly tell you which are the ones that have and haven't been seen. It's been 50 years, and the issue of haven't been seen before becomes more and more sort of intangible and actually unimportant, because you've probably seen the best if you've been following her over the last 50 years. And the interesting thing about the ones that haven't been seen are probably, relatively speaking, perhaps their ordinariness. The fact that she. What she set out to do, and she actually once wrote to someone that she wanted to photograph everyone, everyone on Earth. And what you see with the ones you haven't seen before, because they haven't been selected for one reason or another before, is that she was really interested overwhelmingly in everyone that she has this rep. She has this reputation for people on the fringe, but in fact, those just happened to be the ones that people were surprised to see. She considered them all to be just part of humanity. And so it's the. It's our failure to recognize that people on the fringe weren't seen before, rather than her inclusion of everyone in her idea of who should be photographed.
- [26:55]
Alison Stewart
Yeah. Matthew, I was gonna ask you some of the descriptions of people. The first description, it describes three small people who are Russian from 1963. And it uses a piece of language that people would find offensive now in the title. And there are a couple of text messages, text issues, which have words in it that we wouldn't use. Now, why did you choose to use the initial language?
- [27:29]
Matthew Humery
Because when this, you know, so that's part of the history, that's part of, you know, that's the title. So I didn't want to change anything. I just wanted to, in agreement with the estate, like to keep everything the way these things, you know, the title has been named first, and I think it's important not to translate anything and to keep the reality the way it was. And I think it's important to face it at the end.
- [27:59]
Alison Stewart
What do you hope people get out of this exhibit, Neil, when they leave?
- [28:06]
Neil Selkirk
Oh, perhaps a realization which I think is generally permeating anyway now, after all this time that the outsiders were the public who were looking. She was the person who saw the world in a complete form. She knew that everyone was actually human. And now you can look in this huge show which is just this mass of humans and realize that they're all part of the. I mean, this is like the sort of completion of the circle. You realize what she was up to, that she incorporated everyone and that. That's stunning.
- [28:58]
Alison Stewart
The new exhibition of the work of photographer Diane Arbus is now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. It's called Constell. I have been speaking with curator Matthew Humero and print developer Neil Selkirk. Thank you for your time, gentlemen.
- [29:12]
Neil Selkirk
Thank you.
- [29:13]
Matthew Humery
Thank you very much.
- [29:15]
Alison Stewart
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