Diane Arbus, the late renowned photographer, is presently featured in a London exhibition which reveals her ‘grotesquely bleak but brutally truthful vision of humanity’. The cultural critic Susan Sontag condemned Arbus for dwelling on misery and ugliness, calling her work anti-humanist. Her defenders say that Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud and Velázquez, all shared her disenchanted eye. She was deemed to have transformed photography by helping to normalize marginalized groups – cross-dressers, strippers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men.
She was born 14 March 1923 1.30am New York, with wealthy Jewish immigrant parents from Russia who owned a Fifth Avenue fashion department store though all the family including her siblings were creative. At 18 she married Allan Arbus who later acted as the psychiatrist in the tv series MASH. She committed suicide at 48, which as one critic pointed out is reflected in her photography – ‘someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. Her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species.’ She had experienced “depressive episodes” during her life, similar to those experienced by her mother; the episodes may have been made worse by symptoms of hepatitis.
A year after her suicide, she became the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale where her photographs were “the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion” and “extremely powerful and very strange”.
She had a Pisces Sun, the favoured sign for photographers since they incline towards the image and not words. Her Neptune was powerfully aspected in her 8th opposition her Aquarius Moon and Venus square Mars in Taurus. And on one leg of a yod sextile a 10th house Saturn and inconjunct Uranus and South Node (and widely Sun). She also had a creative and confident Water Grand Trine of Pluto in her 7th trine Jupiter in Scorpio trine Uranus which would tend to enclose her in her own bubble of reality.
Her yod focal point Uranus would give her the capacity to be a creative trailblazer and independent-spirited, tending to cut across conventional norms. She would be both divisive in effect as well as a catalyst for change.
What an interesting and desolate woman, swamped in Piscean energy – visionary, expressive, yet imbued with Neptune’s cosmic chilliness and detachment.
Ketu or south node in hinduism means body and the other side is Rahu in opposite house as beheaded so detached sign and ruler of pisces which is her sun sign and in yod and said to be main character of birth chart as rising sign hence detached as ketu is detached body so sensitive which can’t think. Neptune modern ruler in western astrology makes it ocean kind boundaryless so it’s not limited nor can control thoughts and emotions.
Saturn with moon is vish (venom) yog in hinduism and depression and affliction in birth chart and suicidal as saturn is emotionless and moon all about emotions and illegitimate saturn is murderer of legitimate son moon of sun father but human body gets life from sun so all it does is curb emotions expressions.
South node is asura body or demon body which masked self as God to get nectar hence got beheaded hence ugliness but since it became immortal due to nectar drops, it is still ugly and devotional, living with Gods as hidden.
Rachana: As always, thanks for your informative eastern astrological input and the symbolism behind Rahu and Ketu. I know that Marjorie is very good at pointing them out in someone’s chart and that I really need to pay more attention to them myself.
Didn’t Marjorie once say that Moon opposite Neptune is indicative of mother issues?
Chiron in Aries, and Mars in Sag in the 4th to me is unrelenting issues in the birth home, maybe some form of violence with the mother.
Moon Neptune is a mother with no psychological boundaries so difficult to separate out own feelings from mother’s feeling. Mars in 4th more to do with father.
Thank you, Marjorie.
She has Chiron on her Nadir, opposition Saturn on the Midheaven which could indicate her emotionally unavailable parents and distant mother who was more interested in pursuing her social life (Aquarius Moon square Jupiter in Scorpio) and who also suffered bouts of depression.
Arbus came from a privileged home and was raised by a series of nannies, one of whom, who she called ‘Mamselle’, she formed a close bond with. Her mother, according to writer, Alex Marr: “…suffered a nervous breakdown that left her unable to wash or dress for many months, while the children were cared for by the help; during this period, 11-year-old Diane locked herself in her bedroom for hours at a time.” The biographer Patricia Bosworth wrote: “she’d lived with depression always – melancholia had pervaded the atmosphere” of the childhood home. Arbus claimed she knew she had depression by the time she was 11 years old. Chiron’s exact conjunction to the IC in Aries can make an individual feel alienated from their roots, home and family, and Saturn on the Midheaven very aptly describes her mother’s illness and its imapct. I feel that this opposition across the parental axis could also indicate some kind of generational trauma (chiron conjunct IC).
Arbus felt a world away from her privileged background, an outsider. I would imagine she felt an affinity with her unusual subjects and that they in turn reflected something of that bleak Chironic energy back to her. She was known to occasionally have sex with her subjects and once took part in an orgy – she had Venus in Aquarius square Mars in sensual Taurus. Arbus’s depression was likely bipolar – she took risks and suffered the highs as well as the lows. Reading about her memories of childhood, it’s clear she suffered from some kind of Anhedonia – the inability to feel spontaneous joy or exuberance. Arbus’s Neptune in the 8th could also plunge her into dark places – Neptune there giving rise to emotional storms and shipwrecks – a very challenging placement for Neptune.
There’s something so Neptunian about the practice of photography. It can be an isolating occupation, standing as one does apart from the subject, behind the lens. The darkroom itself can be a sanctuary or cell as is locking oneself into a pitch dark cabinet, performing the ritual of releasing the roll of film from the camera, reeling the film into the spool, dipping that into a container of liquid chemicals – all done blind, all of which is prior to the actual printing process in the dim, infrared darkroom itself.
Thank you for the article, Marjorie.
Although I like much art that exposes at the dark side of human nature, she is far too bleak for me to take. Not a hint of anything positive in her vision.
Diane was 48.3679 yrs old at suidice date. Create her Harmonic chart for this age and
superimpose it on her natal chart to form a biwheel. At death, Harmonic Uranus is
conj her natal IC while Harmonic Pluto trines her natal Sun.
She gets her depression from Moon trine Saturn and also from Melancholia trine Asc.
There are two synonyms for photography…Niepce and Diaguerre. Mars trines
Diaguerre giving her energy in this as a career option. Niepce, photokgraphy conjoins
her Uranus-Sun,..she would produce oddball, different pictures than the norm.
Hephaistos, ugliness joins her Jupiter, so this grotesque, ugliness would be a large
them in her pictures.