A lost series of out-of-character Diane Arbus photographs resurfaces
By Theo Douglas

Nefertiti’s mummy. A rare Bugatti stashed in a New York garage since 1962. The mantelpiece from Marion Davies’s beach house. Sooner or later all old things resurface, however briefly. The latest is a series of 15 color transparencies the legendary photographer Diane Arbus shot for a Zeiss lenses advertisement in 1969, just two years before she killed herself.

Unlike her Identical Twins—an inspiration to Stanley Kubrick and the world’s 10th-most-expensive photograph—what’s now known as “Horowitz by Arbus: The Lost Diane Arbus Portraits” (on view starting Monday at Flazh!Alley Studio in San Pedro) was never intended to be a show. Originally, it was a series in origin only (Zeiss purchased just one frame), and it was a huge departure for Arbus, best known for her pictures of people on life’s edge—-from Jewish giant Eddie Carmel to sideshow Jack Dracula. She worried she was selling out.

“Diane, because it was such a commercial venture, felt like she was compromising herself,” says gallery owner Joe Flazh. “She was doing it for the money. She said, ‘Bob, if you’ll model for it, I’ll do it.’” Bob was—and is—Bob Horowitz, who uses the name Bob Barry professionally. Today, he’s a Los Angeles photographer, best known for his photographs of jazz musicians; but then, he was a struggling New York actor so impressed by Arbus that he wrote her a letter and received back an invitation to her studio. “They became friends,” Flazh says.

Then came the letter from Zeiss—famous makers of high-quality camera lenses—wanting Arbus to contribute a portrait to a photo series promoting their lenses. “They were calling it something like ‘Five of the world’s up-and-coming photographers,’” Flazh says. Arbus was in her mid 40s. She was established. She’d forged a distinctively somber style that dignified someone like Dracula—who tattooed his own face—while simultaneously highlighting life’s everyday eeriness.

These photographs are, in many ways, the opposite of that. Horowitz poses—in pointy shoes, synthetic shirt, suit coat, and what looks like a trilby—as a shutterbug with a camera around his neck; the set-up was that he was some sort of a tourist captured by Arbus. And, whether intentionally or not, the effect—thanks to the childlike innocence in Horowitz’s impenetrable gaze—is sometimes almost comedic. The color film, his demeanor, the settings—many in Central Park, some in anonymous hallways and elevators—is at times uncannily commercial. Especially in the frame which Zeiss wound up purchasing: Horowitz is leaning down as if beckoning at something off-camera. His expression is puckish, and the ad copy tries to be. It reads:

“Diane Arbus found pigeons and fun in the park: ‘This is Bob Horowitz photographing pigeons with the Contaflex 126. You can’t see the pigeons because they kept walking away, but Bob likes the camera. He liked the Crackerjack, too.’”

Another frame is more classically Arbus: a serious Horowitz posing in front of a bare tree in a Central Park grove of similarly denuded trunks. Behind him, blurred by the range, the figure of a man turns away. This is less self-explanatory. It’s Flazh’s favorite transparency of the lot—and it’s one that Zeiss didn’t buy.

• • •

The transaction over, the ads run, Arbus disposed of the 16 color transparencies—and the print, which Zeiss had returned distressed, so she couldn’t resell it. She gave them to Horowitz. He kept them safe for a generation, until one night he came to a show by a friend of his, photographer Don Saban, at Flazh’s gallery. The two men started talking. Horowitz mentioned he had some Arbuses; he’d had trouble showing them—trouble establishing their provenance, trouble from Arbus’s notoriously protective estate. Flazh knew he had a great show, even if it wasn’t standard Arbus fare.

“It’s quite a story in the way it happened,” Flazh says. “He just happened to come to this show for his friend.”

And because he did, another piece of history comes to light.

HOROWITZ BY ARBUS: THE LOST DIANE ARBUS PORTRAITS FLAZH!ALLEY STUDIO | 1113 S PACIFIC AVE | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.833.3633 | FLAZHALLEYSTUDIO.COM | OPEN BY APPOINTMENT | PUBLIC RECEPTIONS AUG 2, SEPT 6, OCT 4, 7-11 PM | THROUGH OCT 13 | FREE