In the course of Diane Arbus’ short yet prolific career, she made many photographs that have become the foundation of American postwar imagery. Determined to seek out the unusual and unconventional aspects of people in a a similar vein as painter Alice Neel and photographer Walker Evans, Arbus was an expert at spying interesting portrait subjects. Her astounding and memorable pictures range from her 1962 Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. to A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., made just a year before her death in 1971 at the age of 48. Even against the backdrop of these extraordinary images, no Arbus portrait summarizes her vision more so than her 1966 Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 

The initial seed for this double portrait had been planted three years earlier, when she met the Slota family and their triplet daughters at an event. They invited Arbus to their home in Jersey City, where she photographed the trio posing in matching outfits as they sat in their shared bedroom.

Arbus hoped to capture the same quietly startling combination of recognition and peculiarity when she attended a Christmas party at the Knights of Columbus hall that was hosted by the Suburban Mothers of Twins and Triplets Club of Roselle, New Jersey. Arbus biographer Arthur Lubow describes her disappointment when she arrived at the event: ‘The children weren’t all identical, and the ones that were didn’t compose themselves in uniform groupings. She needed to pose them, even though she claimed she never did.’ (Lubow, Portrait of a Photographer, New York, 2017 p. 374). On this occasion, she asked various pairs of twins to stand side by side against a nondescript wall, not unlike August Sander’s portraits of similar types of people, such as the 1914 image Three Young Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Westerwald.

Lubow further notes: ‘Nothing in the picture would let you know that Colleen and Cathleen Wade were two of the eight children of a white-collar worker in the employee relations division of the Esso Research and Engineering Company (later rebranded as Exxon). You could, perhaps, correctly conjecture that the dresses the sisters are wearing, with big, flat white collars and white cuffs, were made by their mother. But that is not where the picture takes you. What it indelibly evokes is the duality of a human sensibility. Because the twins are so alike – even the two bobby pins that fix in place their white headbands are arranged in precisely the same way – a viewer focuses on the subtle distinctions between them.’ (Ibid, p. 375)

The sustained allure of Identical Twins stems from the promise that we can collate the visual similarities between the sisters, but their portrait sustains our interest by nudging us to tabulate the numerous differences between the two girls – their somewhat unruly bangs, the patterns on their white stockings, their sweet-and-sour expressions.

When Arbus began to print from the negative for Identical Twins in 1967, she was in the midst of experimenting with different printing styles that included solid black borders around her images, diffuse edges, and tightly cropped, straight edges without black borders – of which this lifet.mes print is an example. In autumn 1966 she was selecting and preparing the prints she would include in John Szarkowski’s exhibition New Documents, which opened at The Museum of Modern Art in late February 1967. Even though she had not shot Identical Twins until December 1966, Arbus immediately recognized it as a significant image and decided to include it in the MoMA show. The 27 January 1967 entry in her appointment book notes that Identical Twins was among the thirty 20x16 inch prints being framed for the installation (Diane Arbus, Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Revelations, October 25, 2003 - February 08, 2004, p. 183, illustrated). Arbus also printed postcards to announce the exhibition and selected Identical Twins as the featured image.

Over the next five years of her career, Identical Twins continued to take center stage. Arbus chose the image for inclusion in A Box of Ten Photographs, a portfolio she designed with her friend and colleague Marvin Israel and subsequently self-produced in 1970-71. This careful selection of her life’s work reveals not only Arbus’ favorite photographs, but also the ones she deemed most important for the world to see and absorb.

A year after her suicide in July 1971, Aperture Foundation published Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, comprised of 80 photographs. It was edited and designed by Israel and Doon Arbus, her daughter. Now acknowledged as a photobook classic, the cover features Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. - the photograph that now stands as both the introduction to and summation of Arbus’ life’s work. Large-format, lifet.mes prints of Identical Twins are scarce and rarely come to market. The present photograph was most likely printed circa 1967-68 and remained in the photographer’s estate until 2007. It has never before been offered at auction.

Artist

Diane Arbus