Diane Arbus Portrait of a Photographer

“I can’t do it anymore. I’m not going to do it anymore,” Diane announced. It had been a long, stressful workday, a typical marathon of drudgery and anxiety. In the photography studio she and her husband, Allan, used for their fashion shoots, which overlooked the all-white, double-height living room of their triplex apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Arbuses had established a routine. Allan set up the lights and the camera, told the models what to do and snapped the pictures. During the session, Diane would monitor details, which usually came down to reassuring the models and checking that the clothes were correctly displayed. “Diane would have to go in and pin the dress if it wasn’t hanging right,” Allan Arbus recalled half a century later. “It was a very subservient role. It was demeaning to her, to have to run to these gorgeous models and fix their clothes. It was a repulsive role.” And now, after a decade of collaboration in which they had meshed as tightly as gear cogs, calling each other “Boy” and “Girl,” Diane told him she had had enough.