“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 ArbusOne 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.
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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.
A clip from 1972 documentary ‘Going Where I’ve Never Been: The Photographs of Diane Arbus’ in which Doon Arbus comments on the tapes recorded by Ikkō Narahara.
Provenance
Estate of Diane Arbus, via Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel;
Collection of Ikkō Narahara, Tokyo, 1973, gift of the aboveLiterature
Arbus, Sussman, Phillips, Selkirk and Rosenheim, Diane Arbus: Revelations, pp. 265, 270-271, contact sheet p. 182
Aperture, Diane Arbus, cover and within
Aperture, Photography Past Forward: Aperture at 50, p. 90
'Five Photographs by Diane Arbus', Artforum, May 1971, p. 69
DeCordova, Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children, pl. 51
Greenough et al., On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography, p. 436, pl. 359
High Museum of Art, Chorus of Light: Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection, p. 88
Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Date, p. 290
Oxford History of Art, The Photograph, pl. 7Artist Biography
Diane Arbus
American • 1923 - 1971
Transgressing traditional boundaries, Diane Arbus is known for her highly desirable, groundbreaking portraiture taken primarily in the American Northeast during the late 1950s and 1960s. Famous for establishing strong personal relationships with her subjects, Arbus' evocative images capture them in varied levels of intimacy. Whether in their living rooms or on the street, their surreal beauty transcends the common distance found in documentary photography.
Taken as a whole, Arbus' oeuvre presents the great diversity of American society — nudists, twins, babies, beauty queens and giants — while each distinct image brings the viewer into contact with an exceptional individual brought to light through Arbus' undeniable genius.
ULTIMATE
37
Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967
Gelatin silver print, printed by Arbus in 1967-1969.
Image: 38 x 37 cm (14 7/8 x 14 5/8 in)
Sheet: 50.8 x 40.7 cm (20 x 16 in)
Credited print by 'DIANE ARBUS', titled, dated and dedicated 'for IKO & KIKO [sic] – Marvin' by Marvin Israel in ink on a printed 'A Diane Arbus photograph' label on the verso.
Gifted to Japanese photographer Ikkō Narahara in 1973, this never-before-seen, large-format, lifetime print of Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, with its black borders denoting Arbus’s printing style of 1967-69, is inscribed by the photographer’s colleague and close friend Marvin Israel to Ikko and his wife Keiko. The present photograph remained in Ikko’s collection for over 45 years until his death in 2020. Large-format, lifetime prints of Identical twins are rare to market.
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT COLLECTION, JAPAN
Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 ‡
Sold for £330,200
Rachel Peart
Head of Department, London
RPeart@phillips.com
Yuka Yamaji
Head of Photographs, Europe
YYamaji@phillips.com
Clare Lamport
Head of Sale, Associate Specialist
CLamport@phillips.com
General Inquiries
+44 20 7318 4092
Photographs
London Auction 21 November 2024
23
This lot is no longer available.
