Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C.
Among Arbus's many talents was the ability to engage with strangers on the street and soon find herself invited into their homes. Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C. depicts one such individual Arbus met in 1966 and photographed several times thereafter. At a class she gave in 1971, Arbus related the story of meeting this subject and crossing a threshold from public to private realms:
I was riding my bicycle on Third Avenue and she was with a friend of hers. They were enormous, both of them, almost six feet tall, and fat. I thought they were big lesbians. They went into a diner and I followed them and asked if I could photograph them. They said, "Yes, tomorrow morning." Subsequently they were apparently arrested and they spent the night in jail being booked. So the next morning I got to their house around eleven and they were just coming up the stairs after me. The first thing they said was, "I think we should tell you" – I don't know why they felt so obligated – "we're men." I was very calm but I was really sort of pleased.
In Diane Arbus’s most significant lifetime exhibition, New Documents, a 1967 MoMA group show with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, she included two different photographs of the same person: Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C. 1966 and Transvestite on a couch, N.Y.C. 1966 (2020.277). Arbus made the portraits in the same setting around the same time and the two photographs provide a rare opportunity to explore her process and intentions. In Transvestite on a couch, Arbus presents her subject sprawled and tousled on a daybed, avoiding the artist's gaze. The same individual appears in Transvestite with a torn stocking comparatively engaged, even seductive. Together, the pair are a study in contrasts that reveals how complex and variable was the physical dynamic between the artist and her collaborators.
I was riding my bicycle on Third Avenue and she was with a friend of hers. They were enormous, both of them, almost six feet tall, and fat. I thought they were big lesbians. They went into a diner and I followed them and asked if I could photograph them. They said, "Yes, tomorrow morning." Subsequently they were apparently arrested and they spent the night in jail being booked. So the next morning I got to their house around eleven and they were just coming up the stairs after me. The first thing they said was, "I think we should tell you" – I don't know why they felt so obligated – "we're men." I was very calm but I was really sort of pleased.
In Diane Arbus’s most significant lifetime exhibition, New Documents, a 1967 MoMA group show with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, she included two different photographs of the same person: Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C. 1966 and Transvestite on a couch, N.Y.C. 1966 (2020.277). Arbus made the portraits in the same setting around the same time and the two photographs provide a rare opportunity to explore her process and intentions. In Transvestite on a couch, Arbus presents her subject sprawled and tousled on a daybed, avoiding the artist's gaze. The same individual appears in Transvestite with a torn stocking comparatively engaged, even seductive. Together, the pair are a study in contrasts that reveals how complex and variable was the physical dynamic between the artist and her collaborators.
Artwork Details
- Title: Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C.
- Artist: Diane Arbus (American, New York 1923–1971 New York)
- Date: 1966
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Image: 38.2 x 38.1 cm (15 1/16 x 15 in.)
Sheet: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, Joyce Frank Menschel, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gifts; Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Charlotte and Bill Ford, Lita Annenberg Hazen Charitable Trust and Hazen Polsky Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Joseph Duke, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, Saundra B. Lane, The Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation and Pamela and Arthur Sanders, Anonymous, and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2007
- Object Number: 2007.518
- Rights and Reproduction: © The Estate of Diane Arbus
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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