An Emergency in Slow Motion - making psychobiography the new literary black

Those who know the life and art of photographer Diane Arbus will be more than familiar with the sadness, the all-pervasive melancholy and the strangely enjoyable feeling of having your internal organs shift every time you look at her work.

Two books of her photography, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972) and Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), published by her estate (administered by her daughter Doon Arbus) provide a clear and concise introduction to her work. Diane Arbus : a biography (1984) by Patricia Bosworth is a fairly conventional but thorough and readable account of Arbus' life (and relationship with her immediate family), detailing the what, the when and the how but very, very short on the why of Arbus' work - or her appalling death.

For Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971. She was found in the bath by her lover, artist Marvin Israel, with both her wrists cut, the post-mortem revealing the presence of two kinds of barbiturates in her system.

I confess I've been morbidly fascinated by Arbus' art, life and death since my early twenties. Her photographs of the mentally retarded, grotesque carnival acts, twins, triplets, transvestites, everyday New Yorkers and celebrities are arresting, moving but also very, very repellent. They're almost pure negative emotion and misery with not one tiny interest in capturing calm or prettiness. She is the anti-Avedon.

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (2011) by William Todd Schultz is an exquisitely written and (I don't want to say it, but I will) brave attempt to understand what motivated this desperately unhappy and very complicated artist.

Once more, an Arbus biographer is denied the assistance and involvement of her estate (which is what hampered the Bosworth bio), but Schultz is aided by the recollections of Arbus' psychotherapist, Helen Boigon, whom he met before she died in 2005, and of the book Revelations (2003), published by the Arbus estate, and which is richer in content and analysis than the previous published collections, including quotes and commentary from Arbus' photographic subjects, friends and lovers.

The author goes straight to her work and what it reveals. He analyses the responses of her subjects (who can just as easily be considered her victims), deconstructing her complex relationships with everyone who came into her orbit, always using psychological theory (Klein, Freud, Jung) to anchor and support his analysis. There is the inevitable comparison with that other suicidal artist, Sylvia Plath, but the connections and parallels make sense here.

But this is no hoary old artist-as-depressive chestnut. This is an analytically rigourous look at the nexus of creativity and mental illness. The final portrait of Arbus that emerges (neurotic, sexually troubled, promiscuous, manipulative, needy) is as interesting and as gruesomely compelling as her art.

Big shout out to my adopted Gen Y 'son', Red Karpitz for gifting me this extraordinary book as a belated Christmas present. Well chosen. I enjoyed every word of it. Love, Dusty.