DIANE ARBUS Portrait of a Photographer By Arthur Lubow
Arbus in 1971, the year of her suicide. Credit Eva Rubinstein DIANE ARBUS Portrait of a Photographer By Arthur Lubow Illustrated. 734 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $35. The poet Paul Valéry wrote that anyone preparing to venture into the interior of the psyche had better go armed. It’s a warning to be heeded by the biographer, especially when his subject is as difficult as the photographer Diane Arbus (1923-71). Arthur Lubow, a journalist, confronted a figure heaped in myth, an artist-suicide whose work cannot be disentangled from the tragedy of her depression and death. In his 700-page investigation, he labored in the moonlight penumbra of those other fatal female luminaries: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Francesca Woodman. Lubow never mentions this “tradition,” but it forms the climate of critical and, above all, popular perception of the work. Likewise the sensational appeal of the subject matter: the sideshow characters, sword swallowers, dwarv...