Oh, Diane!

i've always viewed the work of artists who have taken their own lives through a gauzy filter of loss. instead of living on it's own terms their music, pictures, words share a space loaded with desperation and demons and battles their creator's couldn't win in this lifetime. for me, kurt cobain's music is shrouded in his depression. van gogh's paintings (which i love painfully) bear the weight of his madness. it's hard for me to separate the artist's life's work from their life's end.

i went to see the diane arbus exhibit at la county art museum. you may know her as an amazing photographer of what could be described as the 'freaks and geeks' of culture- the disenfranchised, the ugly, the insane. she also killed herself in 1971. i expected to find her torment in the photographs, her conflict in the written words of her journals. i went prepared to be sad and to feel bad and to go through it. but that didn't happen. because somewhere between the pictures of multiple santas posing on an enchanted lawn, a beautiful transvestitie showing off her new cleavage, and a middle age couple at a nudist colony, i forgot how this story ends. i saw life in the eyes of her subjects- life and pain and humanity and the whole crazy bundle of it all mixed together. arbus had the good sense to just let her subjects be, no posing, no judgements. you can't look away. her journal entries, too, bristled with life. she had a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for clipping pulpy stories out of disreputable newspapers. i had just finished reading a letter she wrote to her lover and mentor, and was laughing over a silly line she wrote, when i saw the simple plaque relating the day of her suicide.

and, with surprise, it dawned on me, 'that's right, she's dead.'