Found: Early photos by Diane Arbus of sideshow performers
“We had our awe and our shame in one gulp,” Diane Arbus wrote of watching the assorted freaks and sideshow performers who populated Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, a celebrated basement phantasmagoria on 42nd Street in Manhattan where she began shooting in the late 1950s as she was beginning to hone her stark signature style.
In a poignant 1966 obituary about the museum, which had mostly closed the previous year, Arbus added, “What if we couldn’t always tell a trick from a miracle?”
Decades later a Philadelphia book dealer and collector of African-Americana named Bob Langmuir found himself agonizing over a similar question.
In 2003 he bought a pile of papers from a collector in Brooklyn who had come across them years earlier at an auction of possessions unclaimed from a storage warehouse in the Bronx.
The dusty, yellowed documents and pictures appear to have belonged to a onetime sideshow performer named Charlie Lucas, a black man who worked as the manager of Hubert’s in its last years. Mr. Langmuir was interested mainly because he saw the artifacts as a kind of underground record of the life of an African-American businessman and entertainer.
But when sorting through the pile, Mr. Langmuir found a note in a dog-eared datebook kept by Lucas that stopped him: “Diane Arbus, 131 ½ Charles St. WA 4 — 4608.” Then, he says, he looked again at some of the heavily flashed photographs of performers like Estelline Pike, a sword swallower, and DeWise Purdon, a man with no hands, and wondered: Could these possibly be early Arbus works? Or am I just dreaming?
In the world of collecting it turned out that Mr. Langmuir had come across a miracle, not a trick. ...
Read entire article at NYT
In a poignant 1966 obituary about the museum, which had mostly closed the previous year, Arbus added, “What if we couldn’t always tell a trick from a miracle?”
Decades later a Philadelphia book dealer and collector of African-Americana named Bob Langmuir found himself agonizing over a similar question.
In 2003 he bought a pile of papers from a collector in Brooklyn who had come across them years earlier at an auction of possessions unclaimed from a storage warehouse in the Bronx.
The dusty, yellowed documents and pictures appear to have belonged to a onetime sideshow performer named Charlie Lucas, a black man who worked as the manager of Hubert’s in its last years. Mr. Langmuir was interested mainly because he saw the artifacts as a kind of underground record of the life of an African-American businessman and entertainer.
But when sorting through the pile, Mr. Langmuir found a note in a dog-eared datebook kept by Lucas that stopped him: “Diane Arbus, 131 ½ Charles St. WA 4 — 4608.” Then, he says, he looked again at some of the heavily flashed photographs of performers like Estelline Pike, a sword swallower, and DeWise Purdon, a man with no hands, and wondered: Could these possibly be early Arbus works? Or am I just dreaming?
In the world of collecting it turned out that Mr. Langmuir had come across a miracle, not a trick. ...