Images of a Forgotten Borough

Fresh out of high school and headed for New York, we piled in Glynn’s yellow and white 1957 Plymouth Belvedere with the push button transmission and “Flite Sweep” styling, ecstatic with visions of The Big City and getting away from home. Not too sure where we would be sleeping for the two weeks of our time there, we planned on spending at least the first couple of nights at our friend Dee’s house on Staten Island, thirty minutes across the bay from Manhattan. Arriving in New York just after sunrise, we found our way to the South Street ferry that makes regular crossings to Staten Island. Once on the island, after some wrong turns and confused meandering, it was a surprise to finally to look up and see our friend’s name on a mailbox in front of a large old two-story blue Victorian house. None of us had imagined such a house only a few miles from the concrete canyons of Manhattan. 

Two days later we ended up finding a cheap hotel off Times Square and spending most of our two weeks in the Manhattan district, but we did have the chance on a few days to get a good look at Staten Island with friend Dee playing tour guide. 

Some years later, after I had begun calling New York home, I went back to Staten Island on more than a few occasions, day trips intended for the purpose of nothing more than exploration. It was still at that time a place ‘far removed’ from the tone and textures of life in Manhattan, and never failed to surprise me with sights or faces unexpected. It has been years since those visits to New York’s “forgotten borough” but much of it was brought back recently when I stumbled upon the photographs of Christine Osinski.

Originally from Chicago, Osinski studied first at the Art Institute of Chicago and later received an MFA from Yale. She lives in New York and has for many years taught at the Cooper Union. Her photographs have been exhibited at The Portland Art Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, The New York Public Library and The Museum of the City of New York. In the late 1970s Osinski and her husband lived for a while in Soho but then lost their lease. Soon after that the couple moved to Staten Island and ended up staying sixteen years.

Something about the Staten Island environment excited Osinski and in 1983 and ’84 she began a series of black and white photographs documenting the ordinary life around her. Reminded of her Chicago childhood, she found the people of Staten Island both familiar and exotic at the same time, focusing her camera’s eye on children, people at the beach, houses and block parties. In her own words she admits to “liking all of the crazy people and places.” Something at the edge of Osinski’s work hints at the photography of Diane Arbus, but in the end stands apart as an individual vision of the American condition. 

Through a Lens Darkly

Her favorite locations were carnivals, sideshows, prisons, mortuaries, asylums and seedy motels. Her favorite subjects albinos, midgets, misfits, the crippled, the destitute and the mad. Today the original photographs of those people in those places are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The woman behind the camera was Diane Arbus (pronounced Dee-ann), born in New York City in 1923 and by the time of her death in 1971 one of the most distinctive photographers of the twentieth century.

Her photographs often hint that she lived on the margins of society, that she was only pointing her camera at the rooms and denizens of her daily life. Arbus was born into a wealthy Jewish family with apartments on Park Avenue and Central Park West, a life far removed from the dark freakishness that characterizes most of her photographs. Life defined by the niceties of Park Avenue and upper middle class sentiments proved to be artificial and divorced from reality. From this sense of smothering the young woman wandered out as a voyeur into an underworld that brought danger, fascination and face-front exposure (like her photographs) of the ugly realities in life.

She married photographer Alan Arbus at eighteen, the two of them making a start in advertising and fashion photography. They were successful at this and their work appeared regularly in Vogue, Glamour and Seventeen. For fifteen years the work of Diane Arbus was as a stylist-art director of her husband’s photographs, centered upon the world of her birth, preserving imagery of things she didn’t believe in—staged set ups of primped and perfect models posed among the bland pastel of middle class dreams.

For Arbus, work as a different kind of photographer emerged in 1959 when she began studying the art with Lissete Model, an Austrian teacher at the New School of Social Research. From this teacher she got encouragement to delve deeper into the unorthodox themes that filled her camera mind, as well as a strong grounding in the technical aspects of photography. By the early sixties Arbus was producing commercial portraits for Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. These early photographs are traditional portraits of famous names, but even so have a quality that is strange, somehow troubling. As in the later work, here too we see the face-front pose with the subject looking directly into the lens. Hard to ignore the feeling that Arbus caught her subjects at a moment when their oddness is most revealed. Her baby portrait of CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper, while beautiful in every pixel is still a picture that makes the viewer stare. Something about the baby’s perfect mouth.

Despite huge popularity and esteem, critics debate the value, morality and meaning of Arbus photographs. There is always the question of why her subjects allowed her to show them as she did, of how she was able to get into their homes. In some cases we wonder if institutions really allow people to wander through their wards with cameras. Susan Sontag had something of a fascination with Arbus and wrote in the New York Review of Books, ‘Arbus’s photographs undercut politics…by suggesting a world in which everybody is alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships.’

Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971 in her Westbeth apartment in Greenwich Village.