Pair this recitation of Mary Oliver’s “The Journey” with “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle and anything helping you recover your inner child.
Making this video reminded me of the photographer Diane Arbus. In 1956 she told her fashion photographer husband Allan “I’m not going to do it anymore”. Assisting him as he shot in their Upper East Side studio for Harper’s and Vogue, she thought fashion photography was a lie. Racing home to cook dinner for dad and their 2 daughters, Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name” wasn’t lost on Diane Arbus.
She divorced and spent the rest of her days, until she killed herself at 48, photographing twins and triplets with her twin-lens reflex, carnival performers, little people, nudists, calling her subjects “aristocrats”, and Arbus was the queen manipulator, seducing people for their secrets; “this photographing is really the business of stealing”.
She struggled with depression, motherhood and being a professional artist, especially in the ‘60s. According to Arthur Lubow, she placed herself in danger for the high of creating and sexual promiscuity, eventually contracting Hepatitis B. Born into privilege, her mother had a nervous breakdown and young Diane developed a romantic relationship with her brother. Weeks before she died, she told her therapist they were still sleeping with each other. The art director Marvin Israel was also her lover. He remained married to his wife, and even slept with Arbus’ daughter Doon. By 1967, Diane Arbus was one of 3 artists in MoMA’s first major photography show, but Arbus still sold her prints for practically nothing and hesitated to work with a gallery.
Arbus’ work influenced me as a young photographer, leading me to train under Mary Ellen Mark (a successor in some ways), and studying with Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her work. But I see the confluence of her choices, process, family histories and trauma as a warning. There is nothing functional about the tortured artist. Arbus proclaimed “It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...The only thing to do is to go the limit with it.” I reject this pressure of limits and instead embrace my inner child, making my life a “work of art”...but I’ll always admire your fire Diane.
Sonata in G Major by @johannesbornlofcomposer
The Journey
By Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
