The Work Speaks for Itself

Patricia Bosworth, biographer of Diane Arbus, published in 1984, first met the photographer as a model in the 1950's when Allen and Diane Arbus were husband and wife collaborators as fashion photographers. Most people like to forget that Arbus actually came from a fashion empire (her father and grandfatherwere furriers and owned a huge 8 floor department store in New York). Allen and Diane worked together until one day late in the fifties, she became so depressed that she walked away from it all.

Patricia was John Robert Powers model, and was wearing falsies, crinolines, a waist-cincher, and pancake make-up the day she arrived at Arbus's studio for her first big photo shoot as an eighteen year old fashion model. Diane greeted her at the door in barefoot and pulled her into the studio, "oh good, you don't look like a model, that's why we hired you," she told Patricia.

Years later when Bosworth became a journalist, she would often run into the little woman with intense eyes who was completely absorbed in what you were saying. Once Diane told Bosworth she had just won a Guggenheim that paid her to photograph a beauty contest at a nudist camp.

When Bosworth started to work on Arbus's biography, she was told by Doon Arbus, Allen and Diane's oldest daughter that she could not contribute to any biography that touched on her mother's life - "that the work speaks for itself."