Steve Martin: Disneyland, Diane Arbus, and Me

When I used to be 17, I labored at Fantasyland’s magic store as a magician demonstrating Svengali decks, cups and balls, and the Incredible (their phrase) Shrinking Die. I beloved working to exhaustion, and I used to be proud to grow to be the store’s youngest evening supervisor. When Disneyland’s summer time hours had been prolonged to 9 p.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends, I used to be in heaven. I might watch date evening unfold, permitting me to look at and soak up teen romantic norms. One evening, nevertheless, an opportunity encounter with a famend artist was to grip me greater than 60 years later, setting my nostalgia for Disneyland in dramatic black and white.

A summer time night in 1962: The fireworks had been over, the crowds dwindled, and the shop emptied. I counted out the registers, turned out the lights, and locked the hand-carved sorcerers’ doorways behind me.

My regular route out was via Sleeping Beauty’s fortress, over the moat by way of a working drawbridge. But tonight, a safety guard stopped me. “Can’t go that way, gotta go out the side exit.” “Why?” I requested. He stated, “There’s a photographer taking a picture.”

In Focus: Opening day at Disneyland, 1955

I obediently took the adjoining aspect route (in these days, movie was costly, so nobody stepped in entrance of even essentially the most informal snapshot). I handed the photographer, a girl. I need to say I keep in mind the digicam, whether or not it was on a tripod or whether or not she held it, and what she was sporting. But I can’t. I need to say I used to be there when the digicam clicked as I strolled by, however I can’t. I need to say I ended and chatted. I didn’t, however I want I had. Because the photographer was Diane Arbus.

Arbus, among the many most famous photographers of the twentieth century, is known for her photographs of the outliers next door—carnies, equivalent twins, unique dancers, and weight lifters, amongst others. (It’s sloppy to name her topics “freaks,” as some observers did, a time period that slanders the themes in addition to the photographer.) She discovered individuals to {photograph} who had been visually charming and dignified, and who pulled us into fringe worlds that the majority of us know nothing about.

Her photographs with out individuals as topics are uncommon and extra hardly ever proven. There exist solely a dozen or so depopulated photographs, together with a puddle on a sidewalk, a wax-museum axe assassin (I’m calling a waxen axe assassin a nonperson), a facade of a Hollywood film set with scaffolding propping up its skeletal shell, and the creepy inside of a darkish experience at Coney Island.

After a bus journey from Manhattan to Southern California, she determined to {photograph} what she known as “pseudo places,” an apt description of Disneyland’s excessive, rampant whimsy. Her pocket book from the interval: “I have found the most wonderful pseudo places at dawn in Disneyland, ruins of Cambodian temples which never existed, false deserts littered with bones of animals who never died, mountain like a shrine for unbelievers. And black swans swim in the moat of a castle which looks like the advertisement for a dream.”

The presence of Disneyland’s “guests” within the photographs, I suppose, would have given the photographs a memento context that will have rendered them flat, so Arbus organized entry within the off-hours, when the park can be empty. (The park’s guidelines had been extra easygoing then. Remember, I began after I was 10 years outdated and was paid my day’s earnings—about $1.50—in money.)

She turned her digicam on “Skull Rock,” a self-explanatory title describing an outcropping of plaster, the place a Yo-Ho-Ho lifeless man’s cranium emerges out of the volcanic upheaval (across the nook from Mr. Toad and simply behind the Chicken of the Sea pirate ship). Arbus’s picture transforms a pretend scary place into an precise scary place: The {photograph} is nightmare materials for each kids and adults.

She additionally shot a sundown scene of ersatz boulders, trying like a carapace military resting on transports, ready to be moved into place. The picture is formally titled Rocks on wheels, Disneyland, Cal.1962. But it’s undoubtedly misnamed: The setting is a mountainous terrain, most likely the Anaheim Hills, whereas Disneyland’s area is as flat as Kansas. The rocks had been touring to, and had not but arrived at, Disneyland.

The picture delivers a Daliesque pressure of surrealism—in addition to a touch of humor, however solely if you would like it. In Arbus’s Disneyland collection, humor was the very last thing on her thoughts. The inevitable irony inherent in declaring phony locations—motels that appear to be tepees and large roadside dinosaurs—is absent from these truthfully delivered photographs.

Her ultimate Disneyland picture is of Sleeping Beauty’s fortress, the proper “pseudo place” and my residence away from residence—the place I heard Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” on a loop. The fortress’s authority makes you imagine it’s actual, regardless of being smaller than it ought to be, prettier than it ought to be. (If you turned your head to the best, you possibly can see a TWA rocket ship prepared for launch to the moon.) Arbus photographed the fortress as if it had been a tasty candy—extra akin to what it was to us Disneyland romantics than to a Manhattan ironist. There isn’t any proof of mockery within the picture, and if there may be, definitely the glowing white swan gliding on the moat’s black water doesn’t realize it.

As the many years handed, I grew to become extra conversant with Arbus’s work. But I remained unaware of the fortress picture till a lot, a lot later.

When I lastly noticed the fortress picture, it was like being stunned by a snapshot of your toy field from whenever you had been 5. A sudden yank again in time, pulled not simply by familiarity, however by a tangible recall of time and place, with the temper precisely proper. For the primary time in years, I remembered the incident with the mysterious photographer. Research confirmed that the dates lined up, the hours lined up, the placement lined up: The after-hours lone photographer I handed was undoubtedly Diane Arbus.

My nostalgia—extra like melancholy—for Disneyland has waned however shouldn’t be absent. It has been changed by a bundle of newer recollections, of household and parenthood. But seeing the picture now, practically 65 years later, I’m taken again to the fortress undimmed, starlit, swan-lit. In Arbus’s thoughts, I’m positive the picture was barely bent, however to me it’s correct, simple, and ever so actual, even whether it is pseudo.

This article seems within the July 2026 print version with the headline “Disneyland With No People.”