You remember the famous Diane Arbus photograph I posted the other day under the "Random Excellence" rubric. (That just means something I encountered randomly, that's all—in this case it was in an auction listing, as I mentioned.) Well, turns out one of our readers, Benjamin Marks, knows the guy in the picture! His name is Colin Wood and he's an insurance salesman in California, married with two kids.
I'll turn it over to Ben:
"I started taking pictures and developing my own film in college back in the mid-1980s. Think: Pentax K1000 and a 50mm ƒ/1.7 lens, Tri-X and the Sprint chemistry that was a staple of college darkrooms in those days. One of my friends was an older student, Colin Wood, who was completing college later than most of us. At some point after our paths crossed, he asked me whether I knew the Diane Arbus photograph of the kid holding the hand grenade. I said I did, and he said, 'Well, that's me.' He and I 'collaborated' on a bunch of projects...mostly what I call now 'college kids messing around with cameras.' Over the years, we talked about the Arbus picture and he said that he had been in contact with Doon, the executor of Arbus' estate, and had generally been met with hostility or indifference when he asserted his identity as the kid in the picture. Nevertheless, I believe Colin's story. For what it is worth, it was covered in an SFGate article in 2003.
Colin Wood by Benjamin Marks, 1980s
"I spoke to Colin yesterday and explained that I wanted to send a picture or two of him from the 1980s to you and he said he was fine with it. Colin is a colorful, interesting, and thoughtful guy. Here are a couple of pictures of Colin when he was in his late twenties. I can see the resemblance to the grenade-kid photographs. He looks more or less the same today, except with grey hair and kids of his own.
Photo by Benjamin Marks
"These photos did take a little digging in my 'archives' (scare quotes to denote a glancing relationship only with the level of organization that the word 'archives' implies). Along the way, I looked at a number of contact sheets that I haven't inspected in years. There ought to be an adjective specific to the kind of memory-immersion that review of old contact sheets causes. I suspect German has a sixteen-syllable compound word for it. This, in turn led to setting up a film scanner for the first time since I bought my current computer and scanning pictures of friends to whom I haven't spoken in years. That is a separate set of tangents, though.
"Another thing that struck me was how many separate subjects I crammed into one 36-exposure roll, and how few photographs I devoted to each subject. Often two pictures that I remember as significant at the time are of totally different subjects on the same roll of film."
Ben also said, "My sense is that Arbus didn't go in for model releases in the 1960s when the picture was taken and that the legal landscape has changed significantly, particularly with the rights to children and the sale prices of Arbus' work, although I have no direct evidence of this." Actually, she wouldn't have needed a model release, then or now—art photographs, like news and editorial pictures, don't require model releases, even if the resulting artworks are traded for lots of money. I don't know much more about this than Ben does, but my sense is that Diane Arbus was actually very good about giving prints to her subjects, if she knew who they were and where to find them, and if she had given a print to Colin it would have been worth quite a lot now—with that kind of provenance, most likely comfortably in excess of a million dollars. I hope that that knowledge doesn't grate on Colin!
As far as Doon Arbus is concerned, again I know nothing specific, but I'll just hazard a guess that she's probably fielded quite a few calls over the years from people asserting some claim or another over various photographs of her mother's. It's just a guess, but I'll bet many of those people were not, shall we say, well-grounded individuals. :-) So perhaps her attitude should be forgiven until we know more about her feelings about it.
Ben concluded, "I hope this is an interesting data point about a famous-mostly-to-photographers picture. I have ambivalent feelings about Arbus—I find her work deeply affecting, and there is no doubt that she had a great eye (I think the contact print you posted, which is also in the SFGate article, demonstrates this), but her attraction to the marginal (and then my attraction to the marginal) never sits entirely comfortably with me. That is part of her value, I think, as a photographer—to make the viewer confront his own discomfort. I put Sally Mann in the same box for the purposes of my own moral compass."
I don't think it's a picture that's famous only to photographers. The book is, after all, one of the great photographic bestsellers in the whole history of American photography, and that photograph is among her most recognized. The ambivalence Ben mentions is part of her work and part of her genius. Sally Mann once told me she likes to "tweak peoples' tails," which she certainly did. The difference is that various commentators have felt that Diane had some psychological issues that were being worked out in her pictures—that's the subject of endless speculation now, sometimes even at book length. Diane's psyche belongs to the ages now, of course. Like her photographs.
We've talked about the subject of two others before, Anderson Cooper as a baby and the famous twins immortalized in the movie "The Shining." How interesting to hear about the subject of another of them. Many thanks to Ben and, indirectly, to Colin.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Dave Kee: "I just read New York Magazine's 2016 article 'Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century?' All I can say is: wow."
James Rhem: "I could go on and on and on about the Arbus estate. It's not surprising Colin was met with hostility. Ask any scholar who's tried to write on Arbus what the estate is like."
Mr. Wood was interviewed in the BBC4 series "The Genius of Photography" where he gives an account of meeting Arbus that day in the park, offering some context of what he was like as a kid and his family life at the time. Very interesting and quite charming.
Posted by: Peter | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 11:34 AM
From make-believe boy terrorist to insurance salesman doesn't sound like a big leap.
Posted by: Herman | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 11:57 AM
Your excellent Arbus post led me to the past post which led me to April 2007 when it was predicated that still photography would be video, in 10 years. Which is now.
http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-you-thought-you-had-good-buffer.html?m=1
Your blog is a time machine. I fast forwarded to 2017 and it has not yet occurred.
BUT
I have now turned into a junky reading posts from more than ten years ago. I love it.
Posted by: Jack | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 01:11 PM
Well that's a fun side-story! Thanks so much for putting this out there for us, Ben (and Mike)!
When I hear the backstory and/or update of a famous image or its subject I am reminded with just how really meaningless and misleading photographs usually are. The closest relation to this Arbus image that I know of is this image by William Klein. Similar story of a prompted moment in a completely benign children's play session. But it became an icon for anger and resentment worldwide.
Related to Ben's story, I've always found it amazing that Bruce Davidson managed not only to get to know so many of the subjects from his renowned documentary work but he also kept in touch with them for many years! You can get a taste of this from this talk he gave at the Strand bookstore not long ago. To me this is what most strongly set Davidson's work above most other documentary shooters.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 01:22 PM
Diane Arbus was an early influence of mine after my Vietnam Era service stint was finished and I returned to college. Wrote a paper about her for Photography class with which my professor was not fully appreciative of (he became an Ansel Adams Biographer). I think the photograph of the boy and the grenade was extremely symbolic of the times as was the photo of the person or persons in skimmers at some political event. I was always taken by the text describing some of those she photographed. Revealing in many ways- from my memory. Still have the book, I'll have to take another trip through its pages.
Posted by: Del Bomberger | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 01:37 PM
Great backstory, clearly he is the kid in the photo. Seeing the others of him as a young man gives one pause to consider how our impressions of photos may not always be what they seem to be on first glance. The contact sheet you posted on the previous related post demonstrate the power of working a subject and how much difference can occur in a relatively short amount of time spent exploring the possibilities.
Posted by: Mark Kinsman | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 03:22 PM
That Arbus picture always associates in my mind, a kind of association of opposites, with the Emmet Gowin image of the child holding an egg in each hand. A wee way down this page: https://alchetron.com/Emmet-Gowin-578582-W
Posted by: Nicolas Woollaston | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 03:58 PM
When I think of how many photos of children at play are not being taken these days, it saddens me a bit.
I am fairly fearless when it comes to pointing my camera at many subjects (especially with my nighttime photography), but even so, photographing other people's children is a line I very rarely cross these days, even though the law doesn't (yet!) prohibit it.
Being a middle-aged man, it's just too easy for people to draw the wrong conclusion. I simply don't need the hassles that (too often) accompany such unwarranted and baseless suspicion. 8^(
Posted by: JG | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 06:06 PM
I notice there is a distant figure behind the boy with the hand grenade. No doubt if that photo had been taken today the figure would be Photo Shopped out.
Posted by: bongo | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 06:16 PM
Great read. This is the sort of post that keeps me coming back.
Posted by: Paul Richardson | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 06:24 PM
Even though I am not a huge fan of Diane Arbus, I do appreciate some of her work, and this piece is one I always remember. It has been a joy to read about Colin and to learn about the person beyond the picture. Not trying to put salt on a wound here, but I feel the Arbus Foundation should bequeath Colin with an original print or two.
Posted by: Darlene | Monday, 27 March 2017 at 09:20 PM
These stories are always interesting. They remind you the people in this kind of pictures are actual persons, not mere graphic elements in the composition. (And I say this despite myself, as I use passers-by as graphic elements in my pictures.)
Having said that, no human story of this kind is more interesting than that of Rich, then known as 'Rat', the teen boy that features in Mary Ellen Mark's "Rat and Mike With a Gun" and several other photographs in Mark's "Streets Of The Lost" essay. Although I believe this story has been covered here, I'll leave this link anyway:
http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article22445760.html
Posted by: Manuel | Tuesday, 28 March 2017 at 07:12 AM
A comment on Kenneth Tanaka's comment.
I've never seen that talk by Bruce Davidson before. But looking at his Outside Inside books, I was struck by his obvious love for his subjects. It doesn't take words, it's just implicit in the photographs.
Posted by: John Shriver | Tuesday, 28 March 2017 at 11:07 AM
I love everything about this post.
Posted by: JOHN GILLOOLY | Tuesday, 28 March 2017 at 04:25 PM
From the NY Magazine story: "She also knew, intuitively, that there was a cost to being on the other side of her lens. “This photographing,” she writes, “is really the business of stealing.”
The kind of quote that stops you in your tracks....
Posted by: Chris Y. | Wednesday, 29 March 2017 at 03:08 AM
Interesting stuff! Here is what I believe to be a very astute quote from Wood that I included in my Arbus book An Emergency in Slow Motion:
"So, back to Arbus for a minute. She unmasked, or opened up, or sought out her own heart in people (she photographed), but I think she peeled away the wrong thing. As much as I find beauty and love and sympathy in what she did, I also think Arbus went down this pathway that brought her to an inconclusive place. What she ultimately found, I think, is nothing. When I look at her art, I see a woman who was misled in many ways by herself."
Posted by: WTSchultz | Sunday, 02 April 2017 at 06:28 PM