Diane Arbus to Alfred Stieglitz

Amid the voluminous correspondence of Stieglitz's later years are several exchanges between the photographer and young women visitors to his galleries, whom he frequendy drew into intimate conversations regarding their personal lives. Dorothy Norman has written regarding one of her first visits to the Intimate Gallery, in 1927, ‘Despite my youthful reserve, what he asked did not seem at all shocking. I wondered why no one else had ever inquired about such crucial matters.’ In keeping with his views on the sources of human creativity, Stieglitz was especially curious about young women's attitudes towards sex and motherhood, and he fastened a solicitous, even anxious attention upon pregnant women who visited An American Place. In June 1996, I chanced to find a letter indirectly documenting Stieglitz's preoccupation, filed in an ‘Unidentified Correspondents’ folder at the Alfred Stieglitz Archive at Yale University. Stieglitz had saved both the letter and its envelope, addressed to him at An American Place and postmarked 8 April 1945. Diane Arbus was 22 years old when she wrote to Stieglitz. He had not made a photography for some 8 years. But in its vivid evocation of Stieglitz's probing curiosity, and Arbus' frank and incisive self-revelation, this unexpected letter is unmistakably a document of two great photographic portraitists at work

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