IN FOCUS: Diane Arbus's 'Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967'

IN FOCUS: Diane Arbus's 'Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967'

A remarkable print of Diane Arbus’s most iconic image creates an ULTIMATE moment to watch at our November Photographs auction in London.

A remarkable print of Diane Arbus’s most iconic image creates an ULTIMATE moment to watch at our November Photographs auction in London.

Diane Arbus, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967. Photographs London: ULTIMATE. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean, everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some slight magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.

—Diane Arbus

One of the most recognisable photographs of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’s (1923-1971) Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, was chosen as the cover of her 1972 retrospective monograph Diane Arbus, which remains one of the most successful photography books of all time and the foundation of Arbus’s international reputation. Published by Aperture, this monograph was edited and designed by her friend and colleague, Marvin Israel, and by her daughter, Doon Arbus. A story little known outside the key players who were involved in the making of her posthumous MoMA retrospective and Aperture monograph was that most of Arbus’s statements used for the landmark publication were taken from Ikkō Narahara’s tape recordings of her 1971 photography masterclass at Westbeth, the subsidised artists apartment complex where Arbus lived.

Diane Arbus teaching her masterclass, 1971. Courtesy of Eva Rubinstein.

When Ikko and his wife Keiko first arrived in New York in 1970, they stayed for a period at Ikko’s friend and fellow photographer Hiro’s apartment at the Dakota. It was during this time that Hiro mentioned Diane Arbus to him as a highly regarded photographer of the moment. When Hiro’s new assistant Neil Selkirk arrived from London, it was Selkirk who made the appointment for Ikko to meet Arbus to attend her masterclass. According to Ikko’s 1993 memoir ‘Diane Arbus and Me [Ikko] — Notes from 1971’, Arbus’s masterclass began in February of 1971, and took place every Thursday at 7pm over the course of two months. Ikko was 39, eight years younger than Arbus, and was already an established photographer in Japan with three critically acclaimed photobooks under his belt. To meet Diane Arbus, whose work he greatly admired, and to think about photography anew were his two main reasons for wanting to participate in her classes.

Among the 30 or so participants were Neil Selkirk, who would become the only person ever authorised to make posthumous prints of Arbus’s photographs, and Anne Tucker, who, in 1976, became the founding curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Marvin Israel also sat in with Arbus on many evenings. With permission from Arbus, Ikko, who was not proficient in English, brought a tape recorder to class to record what she was saying so that he could listen to it again later at home. At the time that he was attending her classes, he could not have imagined that several months later he would learn of her suicide from a call from Hiro, or that his recordings would become an invaluable resource for her philosophies on photography and provide unparalleled insight into her creative process.

Aperture, Diane Arbus, cover, American and Japanese editions.

While working on Arbus’s posthumous monograph, Marvin Israel asked to borrow Ikko’s recordings of her masterclass. As Ikko’s studio was close to Marvin’s atelier, they visited regularly. Shortly after lending his tapes to Israel, Ikko learned from John Szarkowski, who was curating Arbus’s MoMA retrospective, that he too was excited to have gotten hold of the recordings. By lending his recordings to Israel, Szarkowski and Doon, Ikko made available a trove of Arbus’s pronouncements on photography, which were foundational to the study of her work in the coming decades. Arbus’s quotes from Ikko’s recordings, read by actress Mariclare Costello, were used in the 1972 documentary on the photographer, Going Where I’ve Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus.

Exhibition install of Diane Arbus at MoMA, New York, 1972.

It was Ikko who connected Marvin Israel and the legendary Japanese curator and picture editor Shōji Yamagishi, who, at the time, was working with John Szarkowski in preparation for MoMA’s 1974 exhibition New Japanese Photography. The meeting between Israel and Yamagishi led to the introduction of Diane Arbus’s work to Japan. Diane Arbus: Retrospective, curated by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, opened in June 1973 at Seibu Department Store in Tokyo. To mark the occasion, the Japanese edition of the Aperture monograph was published, and Doon and Israel travelled to Tokyo.

Once they had returned to New York, Ikko recalls:

‘…I received a call from Marvin. He said that Doon insisted that Ikko has one of the prints printed by Diane and asked me to choose. After thinking for a while, I ‘ended up’ choosing the photograph of the twins that became the cover of the photobook. I say ‘ended up’ as there were other photographs that attracted me and I was uncertain. However, I felt that that photograph was the most fitting as a memento of my meeting Diane. It seemed to me that the two faces of Diane were peeking out in that photo. Diane must have been cute like that when she was a child. A photograph constantly conceals a glimpse of the photographer’s self-portrait.’ (Narahara, ‘Diane Arbus and Me [Ikko] — Notes from 1971’, Tokyo, 1993.)

This previously unseen lifetime print of Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, is not only a museum-quality masterwork but also an incomparable piece of history, weaving together a rich tapestry of the individuals — Diane Arbus, Ikkō Narahara, Marvin Israel, John Szarkowski, Shōji Yamagishi, Hiro, Neil Selkirk and Doon Arbus — and their momentous encounters in early 1970s New York that helped to shape Diane Arbus’s artistic legacy as we know it today.

Exhibition install of New Documents at MoMA, New York, 1967.

Since its making, Diane Arbus’s Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, has become the image most closely associated with her influential body of work. This photograph embodies a culmination of the strongest interests in her oeuvre: her fascination with children, aberrance, and identity, among them. In late 1966, Arbus was selecting prints for inclusion in John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition New Documents. Although it was a recently made image, Arbus immediately recognised Identical twins, Roselle, N. J., 1967, as a definitive work to be included. New Documents opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in late February 1967, and Identical twins was one of the few large-format prints of the 32 Arbus photographs featured. Arbus also used the image as a postcard to announce the exhibition to friends and contacts and encourage them to see it. It was the only major exhibition of Arbus’s work during her lifetime.

Ikkō Narahara’s print of Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967 offered here, exemplifies Arbus’s printing style between 1967 and 1969 when she surrounded her square images with the broad, uneven black borders of the negative. A filed-out negative carrier enabled this shift to black borders, which eventually gave way to a softened, yet still irregular, treatment, in Arbus’s constantly evolving approach to technique. Arbus included Identical twins in ‘A box of ten photographs,’ her only portfolio.

Large-format prints of Identical twins, N.J., 1967, printed by Arbus herself are held in the following institutions: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Tate, London; and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.