

“A lot of what punk was about was attitude,” she says. Jan admits to being “a wicked ham.” But she also believes her posing had an aspect of honesty that might have drawn people in. “I didn’t want her to have as much fun with other people!” “I was jealous of her other collaborators,” admits Arbus. For the cover of the ninth issue of Stuff, Ken Brown, a local artist and photographer, snapped Long in a tutu standing insouciantly in front of a dinosaur at a miniature golf course by Route 1 in Saugus. A girl working at Goods downstairs from Long cried when she was asked to work in the same department.Įveryone who met Long, says Arbus, took notice. There was something daunting about the person depicted in these images. Long herself recalls a party where three photographs of her, torn from Stuff, were pasted to a wall, and people were standing around talking about how sexy she was. A friend of Long’s spotted one of them hanging in a dorm at Harvard University. Images of Long were in Stuff’s first issue, and eight subsequent ones.
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Eager to generate interest in Stuff, he offered up a free page in the magazine. Levy had learned about Arbus’s photographs of Long. We were both coming up with ideas, working together.” The photographs, she says, were collaborative. When it came to her outfits, says Arbus, Long was always inventive. Jan, in her own words, was “kind of looking nasty.” She was wearing blue jeans, sexy Charles Jourdan high heels, “and a silk T-shirt that you can totally see my nipples.” Also, an old man’s overcoat and a scarf. “I was just learning technique in those days,” she says. It was dusk, and Arbus was nervous about the combination of dimming light and bright neon. On the first occasion, she chose a “filthy bar” - with a hot pink neon sign. Arbus would take Long out to a different location each time. The two young women took to working together on Sundays over a period of about six months. “I’ve never got what people are on about.” Jan Long Collins, 61, remains bemused about the impact she had, not just on Arbus but on others. She doesn’t have big hips or boobs, and her short haircut could be boyish if she wanted it to be.” Jan’s a gorgeous woman, and she’s incredibly feminine in the way she acts.

“I’ve always been interested in androgyny. “I was just really impressed with her,” she recalls. It wasn’t just Long’s clothes that attracted Arbus’s attention, though.
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Sidney Freedman in the TV show “M*A*S*H.” By the time the couple had formally divorced in 1969, he had given up photography and turned to acting, where he gained renown for playing the role of psychiatrist Dr. Her father, Allan Arbus, had been Diane’s partner in a commercial photography business. Her mother, Diane Arbus, who became one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, committed suicide in 1971, at 48. Until recently, she’s resisted taking up the medium, for understandable reasons: Both her parents had worked as photographers. In her mid-20s, Arbus is a photographer who’s still getting used to wielding a camera. There’s something about her that people notice. Jan is working in women’s clothing on the second floor. The place is patterned after a 1930s store with vintage mannequins and counters. Jan Long has a job at Goods Department Store in Harvard Square. And when I did, I was surprised to uncover a story that opened out not only onto the birth of street fashion photography and Boston’s punk rock scene, but a slice of the 1980s every bit as pungent as the art in the ICA’s current survey, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the Gritty locations.Įven so, it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that my daughter’s baby sitter had been a famous photographer’s muse.

And I’d notice amid the floor-to-ceiling salon-style hang some glamorous photographs of Jan in her younger years. Often, around 5 o’clock, when I went to pick up my daughter, I would stay to talk.
