Volume 31, Number 13 · August 16, 1984
Snapshots of the Photographer
By Jonathan Lieberson
Diane Arbus: A Biography
by Patricia Bosworth
Knopf, 366 pp., $17.95
The photographer Diane Arbus—the subject of Patricia Bosworth's new biography—was born in 1923 in New York and forty-eight years later killed herself in her apartment in an artists' community in the same city. Her parents, David and Gertrude Nemerov, were well-to-do Jews whose fortune derived from Russeks, a fur and clothing store which Gertrude's father had founded, and with which David was associated, first as a window dresser, then as merchandising director, and finally as president and chairman of the board. Together with her sister and her brother Howard, who was to become a well-known poet, Diane grew up in a tight, closed, snobbish world of the newly rich, in which she was alternately petted and ignored by her parents, ordered to wear white gloves by her nanny while walking in the park, and confined in an enormous, lonely apartment on Central Park West. Bosworth's account of Arbus's childhood is the best part of her book: she manages to convey something of the pretensions and mannerisms of the Nemerovs, and in her portrait of David Nemerov, a vain and charming, but fundamentally hard, businessman, she introduces us to a person who at times seems far more interesting than Diane Arbus.
Review, 4130 words
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