Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studio in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. Today's show is all about summer. We'll kick off our series of conversations about great beach reads with Laura Lippman. Her latest novel is Murder Takes a Vacation. All Of It producer, Jordan Lauf, will join us to talk about our summer reading challenge. I want to hear what books you're excited to be reading right now. Plus, Vulture TV critic, Kathryn VanArendonk, joins us to preview some of the summer's most anticipated new and returning shows. That's the plan. Let's get this started with some art. The exhibit is called Constellation.

[music]

Alison Stewart: The most comprehensive exhibit of the work of Photographer Diane Arbus is currently up at the Park Avenue Armory. More than 400 prints are displayed in a show called Constellation, which lays out Arbus's work in giant network of metal scaffoldings surrounding you in all directions with mirrors strategically placed. There's no beginning or end to the exhibition, no directions for how to move through it. Each viewer experiences the work of the prolific photographer in their own way. The exhibition comes just over years after Arbus's birth in New York City in March of 1923.

Besides capturing all kinds of New York sites throughout her career, Arbus was also known for her unique subjects. These and lesser-known photographs, some never before displayed, are also featured in the exhibition. Constellation runs now through August 17th. Joining me now are the show's creator, Matthieu Humery. Matthieu, nice to speak with you.

Matthieu Humery: Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Also with me in studio is Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print Arbus's photographs since her death. Welcome, Neil.

Neil Selkirk: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Matthieu, this is the most comprehensive study of Arbus's work to date. What was the goal from the beginning?

Matthieu Humery: First, as it was like for the first time that I had the idea to show the entire photograph, the 454 images that Neil Selkirk printed, I thought I should find a way to find a display how to present all these images together. It was challenging and it took me some time to find out how to organize and to find the right idea of how to present this large body of work. So it was like I like to search a little bit, and then at some point I've got the idea of having this kind of installation. This installation, as you explained it very well, is not about having a classic show as a classic exhibition organized within themes or chronologically order or with any kind of order like this.

I wanted to find a way that the visitors will discover images in a way like Diane Arbus took pictures in New York, discovering people in the park or in the streets. That was the idea and this is how I wanted to do in order to create that show.

Alison Stewart: Neil, what is your relationship to the pieces in this exhibition?

Neil Selkirk: I made them. They are actually the printer's proofs of all of the prints that I made. As I made them, they went into a box, and then at a certain point, I had an awful lot of them. At a certain point, I was approached by Maja Hoffmann and her foundation, and they bought them and did nothing with them for 10 years. Then out of the blue, in 2023, there was going to be this huge show in Arles in France which showed them all, which was pretty daunting. Nothing like that had ever been done before.

Alison Stewart: What did you think when they said, "Oh, we're going to show them all"?

Neil Selkirk: We were pretty horrified, meaning we couldn't imagine that anybody could show them all in a way that was comprehensible. Diane Arbus and I showed up in Arles in the summer of '23 and were completely staggered to be delighted and amazed that Matthieu had succeeded in doing it.

Alison Stewart: Matthieu, when you think about the sheer size of the show, what does it provide the viewer that a smaller show wouldn't provide the viewer about Diane's work?

Matthieu Humery: It's more like the freedom of discovering, in your own way, the picture. If you have a small show or a slightly more organized in a classic way, I think you just lose that. I just thought that would be an opportunity for the viewer to experiment something different. I don't like so much the idea of immersive, because it's not only immersive, it just give you the possibility of navigating the way you want and discovering things.

Sometimes I've got some remarks, "Oh, some images were quite high. I cannot see them." That's not really important in a way. It's better not to see them in not a nice way and to still to be able to see it. Then there is this way of discovering again, and I think this is what I thought was very important for me.

Alison Stewart: Neil, how did you meet Diane Arbus?

Neil Selkirk: Oh boy. In 1968 I was still in photography school in London and I'd been told that the only way to really learn how to be a photographer was to go to New York and apprentice oneself to a photographer. In the spring of '68, I came to New York on a student flight and wound up-- One of the things that I got out of it was I became the London second assistant for Richard Avedon and Hiro, the Japanese photographer who worked out of his studio. Later that summer, Avedon was in London, I was working for him. We were working in John Huston, the film director's house. We were photographing Angelica Huston and her mother and her brother.

We'd set up our white seamless background in their living room and we had time to kill and I was just wandering around in the living room. There was just one photograph, one piece of flat art in this whole large living room. It was a photograph of three naked people sitting on the grass with the back end of a car sticking into it. I was completely devastated. Absolutely devastated by this image. I have never before or since been affected by a work of art in that way. I literally considered running out the door. I was so horrified by it. Then we took the picture, took the seamless way, and I went home and Avedon came back to New York.

Two years later, I had made my way to New York and I was living in Hiro, the photographer's apartment in the Dakota, in the maids room, and propped up against the wall was the same photograph. I said, "I saw that photograph in London." He said, "It's by a woman called Diane Arbus, you'll probably meet her." A few weeks later, sure enough, she showed up at the studio with Marvin Israel. She was a friend of both photographers. She had arranged with Hiro, who had received from Japan the first of a particular kind of camera, Pentax 6×7, that was in the United States. She had asked if she could borrow it because she was seeking to change the format that she was working in and was exploring alternative cameras.

He said he would lend her this camera. It was the only one in the United States. I was given the job of showing her how to use it. She used it for a few weeks, decided she loved it and it was going to become available soon, but she didn't have any money. She asked us if she held a class, would we come, this is the assistance in the studio. Then she eventually put an ad in the New York Times and had a class at Westbeth, and we all went. She got the camera. She periodically would call me for technical advice because she was deeply inquisitive about how to get the results that she was interested in achieving. She knew a bunch of people to call, and I was one of them. That's how I got to know her.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Curator Matthieu Humery and Print Developer Neil Selkirk about Constellation, the new exhibition of the work of Photographer Diane Arbus. It's now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. Matthieu, am I saying your name correctly?

Matthieu Humery: Mathieu Humery.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Thank you, Matthieu. Diane Arbus was born in New York City. She lived here for much of her life. What does it reveal about Arbus to us as viewers that she's a New Yorker and that she's a New York photographer?

Matthieu Humery: When we did the show in Arles first, the funny thing is, like all the New Yorkers, because there is a lot of people coming from New York here in south of France during the summertime, as there is a lot of festival, all of them, the artist show needs to come here in New York, needs to come to New York because as artist from New York, taking pictures in New York and taking New Yorker also as a picture, you just felt like it doesn't make any sense not to show it in New York. Probably there is something like this. I felt like, "We should find out a way to bring and to take that show with all these images altogether. 454 images, again, it's a lot of images.

Then we've got this opportunity to present that at the Park Armory, which present all the characteristic we needed in order to present this huge volume of pictures. I think as an artist from New York, she took a lot of pictures there. Like you as a visitor, it's like walking in the street like in Central park or in Thompson Park, anywhere in New York. Then there is this kind of interesting parallel between the two things. You being able to look at the show and all these images being in New York as well. I think it's beautiful to be able to do this.

Alison Stewart: Neil, Arbus's father was a businessman. He ran a fur emporium, I believe, and she started her early work taking pictures for him. When did she break out on her own as a photographer?

Neil Selkirk: She actually never took the pictures. Her husband, Allan, took the photographs. She styled them.

Alison Stewart: Oh, she styled them? That's interesting.

Neil Selkirk: Yes. They had a business together. They were in the studio together, Allan took the photographs. She had always taken pictures. He gave her a camera. He went into the Pacific Theater in the war, in the Second World War. She'd given him a camera. They were very interested in photography from the beginning. When she was a teenager, they were going to shows and so on. What was the question? [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Well, that answered the question.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It's interesting though, when you think about the family, her brother's a Pulitzer Prize winner. Yes?

Neil Selkirk: Yes, he was the Poet Laureate of the United States. No. Her brother was not a Pulitzer Prize winner. Her brother was the Poet Laureate of the United States. He was a poet.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting that they grew up in that household.

Neil Selkirk: Yes, they were both really smart. They were super smart.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Matthieu, I want to talk about Diane Arbus's process. The text accompanying the exhibition puts Arbus's photography in the context of impressionist painters. Why is this a good place to understand her work?

Matthieu Humery: For two reasons. First, because when this show take place first, it was in Arles. Arles is also like the city of van Gogh. van Gogh, as you know, he make the paintings outside here in the country. I like the idea with the sun and having the idea of make the comparison with the painting. At the time when the impressionist decided to get out of the studio and to confront the reality, the cities or the countryside or outside big city like Paris or south of France, I thought it was an interesting parallel. Then when when the show came here in New York, I reread it and then I said, "Maybe I might change this as this was more related to the first show."

Then after, I said, "At the end, that's the main thing. That's the same thing. It's the same process. That's the same idea." It's just not the same-- It's a big city like New York. It remained the same idea. I decided to maintain the text because I think it fits very well. It was an idea of to translate what some other artists before did. This is also what she did. I think it was a great idea.

Alison Stewart: Neil, you mentioned you worked with several photographers. What was unique about Arbus's work?

Neil Selkirk: I worked with several photographers and I never worked with Diane. She never had an assistant. She always worked alone, completely alone for her own work. Ask the question again.

Alison Stewart: What was unique about what she was able to accomplish working on alone?

Neil Selkirk: Maybe the best way to approach that is that one assumes when one is talking about Diana Arbus, the photographer, that the primary objective when she went out to take a photograph was to photograph. This is not necessarily the case. She was completely personally, individually absorbed with the issue of what makes human beings tick. She primarily wanted to meet them. The photograph was an almost incidental product, a record of that meeting. She would see someone-- in her "The Box of Ten," which is her iconic 10 photographs, are the only ones that she ever put on the market.

At least two of them, I haven't been able to think of the others, were people she saw on the subway and approached, said that she really liked the way they-- I don't know what she said. Essentially, approached them and said she would like to-

Alison Stewart: Take the picture.

Neil Selkirk: -go home with them and take their photograph, and they agreed to do that. Then she spent significant amounts of time with these people because she was fascinated by something about initially the way they looked, and then she wanted to pursue what their life consisted of and try and understand that, and then she took a photograph. At one point, she made this reference to her butterfly collection, which was essentially the photographs were a record of the people she'd met. The photographs were facts. They were not attempts to do something artistic. They were a fact.

Alison Stewart: A fact of the meeting, a fact of the conversation.

Neil Selkirk: There was information in the photograph, and that was what mattered.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking to the Curator Matthieu Humery and Print Developer Neil Selkirk about Constellation, a new exhibition of the work of Photographer Diane Arbus. It's now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. Neil, it is said you are the only authorized person to make prints of Arbus's negatives since her death. How did you wind up in this position?

Neil Selkirk: [chuckles] Completely by chance. I'm not basically a printer. I'm very much not a printer, actually. She's the only person I've ever made the prints for other than myself. Essentially, I'm a photographer. [clears throat] I'd been fired at Hiro's in the summer of 1970 and I went to Europe on a job working for a New York-based photographer. Having completed her course-- this was '71, having completed her photography course that she held to pay for the camera, so I'm in Europe and I get word that Diane had killed herself. I immediately wrote to Marvin Israel who I knew would be involved, and said, "If you're going to memorialize her in any way, I will be back in November and I would like to help."

When I got back to New York in November, lo and behold, they were waiting for me because I was out of a job, didn't need much to live on, and they wanted someone to do the research because it had already been decided with John Szarkowski, who was the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, that there would be a major retrospective in the fall of '72. They needed somebody to find the pictures and print the pictures, and I just happened to be the guy. I just happened to be there.

Alison Stewart: Really, it was a matter of place and time?

Neil Selkirk: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Neil Selkirk: And willingness, opportunity. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Wow. Matthieu, I want to talk a little bit about the arrangement of the exhibition. You call it a Constellation. The photographers are spread throughout the space in a network of metal. There's like a triangle in the middle and [chuckles] there are right angles at everywhere you go. Where did the idea for this layout come from?

Matthieu Humery: I was reading Chronology, which is a book with all the writings from Diane Arbus. I was in a subway reading that, and then at some point-- I went to subway in New York. Then at some point I looked right in the front of me and I saw the map of the subway and I realized that there was a kind of synchronicity. It gave me the idea, "Oh, that's how I should organize the show." Looking at the floor plan, and then, "Okay, I should translate that. I just like this idea." It comes from that. Then, of course, I'd like to translate it with-- not like in flat plans, but with-- it is like high ceilings and the volume. This display should be with this three dimensional aspect. This is how I came.

Then when I explained the idea to the estate, we agreed that it would be more important and nicer to organize this, to spread out all the different series she ever did. If at some point you have a portrait, then you can place a double portrait. If you have a small format, then you can show a larger format. That in order to really not to-- Not something who's not organized, but to spread it out as much as you can in order to get all the diversity of what she was able to do. The only artwork who remained together as one thing, was like hidden somewhere, Ii's The Box of Ten Photographs that's Neil mentioned earlier. That's the only artwork she produce before she committed a suicide. She did that work. That's so strong together.

I wanted to place this in a way that it remained together in this display, but it's not really in the middle. You have to discover it. You do not realize where it is right away, but at some point, then you realize that these 1o photographs remain together. I think it was nice to keep that together for that reason.

Alison Stewart: It is a bit of a hunt when you're in-- [laughs] It's funny, there's a mirror at the back, and this poor woman didn't really realize it until the guard was like, "You're about to crash into the mirror, lady." [chuckles]

Matthieu Humery: In a way, it's a fragmented self-portrait of her. A new part of it. That's the idea. I thought like, "This mirror--" because it's not just-- Of course, it's interesting, but also the meaning of it is really to show that all this picture, it's her. It's a portrait of her, and you're part of this portrait. I think that was also the idea of integrating the visitor part of the installation and part of the work. You are part of that as well. That was also the idea.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, because I think perhaps one of her most famous pictures is the second to last on the list. It's like number 452, the Identical Twins from Roselle in New Jersey. You have to go searching for it and you find it in the corner. How did you think about placing the items?

Matthieu Humery: Oh, I didn't use any sketch or program on computer. I ask an architect to design the structures so we installed them. Then I have been locked for 15 days, 2 two weeks, and I started to place things one by one like this. The first three days was tough, I would say, [chuckles] because I saw that was an idea, but to translate this idea, maybe it might complicate. Then when I started to-- How you start. Then from the starting point, as soon as you get into the installations, and I started to look at more on the side. Then, slowly, he came around, and then things became very clear and I just became like a machine, installing things like this.

He came just like a painter when he start to-- sometimes it's just starting process is a bit difficult. Then it comes up alone by itself, and then you know where to go. Once you get the process, then you just repeat it again and again and again. Then at the end, after two weeks, it was done like this.

Alison Stewart: Neil, out of the photos which haven't been seen, which one do you like?

Neil Selkirk: I can't answer that question because at this distance, at this time, I couldn't possibly tell you which are the ones that have and haven't been seen. It's been 50 years, and the issue of haven't been seen before becomes more and more intangible, and actually unimportant because you've probably seen the best if you've been following her over the last 50 years. The interesting thing about the ones that haven't been seen are probably, relatively speaking, perhaps their ordinariness.

The fact that what she set out to do, and she actually once wrote to someone that she wanted to photograph everyone on Earth, and what you see with the ones you haven't seen before because they haven't been selected for one reason or another before, is that she was really interested overwhelmingly in everyone. That she has this reputation for people on the fringe, but in fact, those just happened to be the ones that people were surprised to see. She considered them all to be just part of humanity. It's our failure to recognize that people on the fringe weren't seen before, rather than her inclusion of everyone in her idea of who should be photographed.

Alison Stewart: Matthieu, I was going to ask you, some of the descriptions of people, the first description, it describes three small people who are Russian from 1963. It uses a piece of language that people would find offensive now in the title. There are a couple of text issues which have words in it that we wouldn't use now. Why did you choose to use the initial language?

Matthieu Humery: That's part of the history. That's the title. I didn't want to change anything. I just wanted to, in agreement with the estate, keep everything the way the title has been named first. I think it's important not to translate anything and to keep the reality the way it was. I think it's important to face it at the end.

Alison Stewart: What do you hope people get out of this exhibit, Neil, when they leave?

Neil Selkirk: Oh, perhaps a realization, which I think is generally permeating anyway now after all this time, that the outsiders were the public who were looking. She was the person who saw the world in a complete form. She knew that everyone was actually human. Now you can look in this huge show, which is just this mass of humans, and realize that they're all part of the-- this is like the completion of the circle. You realize what she was up to, that she incorporated everyone, and that that's stunning.

Alison Stewart: The new exhibition of the work of Photographer Diane Arbus is now on display at the Park Avenue Armory. It's called Constellation. I've been speaking with Curator Matthieu Humery and Print Developer Neil Selkirk. Thank you for your time, gentlemen.

Neil Selkirk: Thank you.

Matthieu Humery: Thank you very much.