The following are excerpts from Sartle's upcoming book Art's Mind: The Creative Lives and Mental Health of Famous Artists, written by Kathryn Vercillo: 

Biographer Arthur Lubow writes of a time Diane recollected being a girl at summer camp, when all of the other girls were bitten by leeches, and she was disappointed she had not: “She complained that she had rarely felt anything in her entire life. She was untouched by the ordinary joys and pains that make people feel alive. This was her prison.”

Despite this admitted numbness to joy and pain, Diane Arbus had a striking ability to pull the drama out of any situation and illuminate it through portrait photography. One of her most famous photographs, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, NYC is exemplary of this skill. The photograph is a powerful image of a knobby-kneed, dirt-stained boy holding a plastic grenade in the park, his mouth set into a grim, serious expression and his eyes bursting wildly out from the image. Author Deborah Nelson explains how this photograph was number eight in a set of eleven that Diane took of the boy, none of which were particularly remarkable, except for this one. In all of the other images, he looks like a normal, happy little boy playing in the park. In the photo she chose to print and publish, he looks entirely different. Perhaps this wildness reflects his true self, and Arbus was only able to capture it in one frame. Or perhaps the boy is a symbol, representative of a certain excitement or intensity Arbus was seeking from life and from the people that she encountered.

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In the 1972 documentary about Arbus’ life titled Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus, she is quoted as saying that people have an actual self and an intended self, and that she liked to capture the gap between the two. She wanted to capture a person disarmed, when the way in which someone tries to present themselves to the world fades, and their internal or “true” self comes through. Of course, as the photographer she has the artistic liberty to determine what she portrays as a person’s “true” self. For example, in the aforementioned work Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, NYC, she apparently determined that the grim, frustrated face of the boy was most accurate to his true self, “truer” in some way than the silly, playful child in the other photos that she opted not to publish.

For a long time, people criticized this photograph, accusing Arbus, with her fascination with “freaks,” of cherry-picking the shots that made her subjects look the strangest. However, when Arthur Lubow interviewed the child in the photograph, Colin Wood, as an adult, Wood said that Arbus had captured exactly what he was going through in his life at the time. His parents were divorcing and he was an angry, upset kid, prepared to “pull the pin” on a grenade. He feels that Arbus did truly see him. In any case, we know that she sought to photograph this “gap,” and that she saw humans as having at least three faces - the one they show to the world, the one they really are, and the one in between. Perhaps her attention to multiplicity in her photographs was a way for her to reconcile her own fragmentation, or the gaps in her self-understanding.