WMU Photography & Intermedia Course Extension Blog

Double Exposure
A Moment With Diane Arbus Created A Lasting Impression
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 12, 2005; Page C01

NEW YORK They remember none of it. Not the lady with the camera, arranging them by a wall at the Knights of Columbus hall in their home town of Roselle, N.J. Not the chocolate cake they had just finished, which is very faintly visible in the picture at the creases of their lips. The Wade sisters, as they were known before they each married, recall nothing about the day they gazed into the lens of Diane Arbus and became part of American photographic history. Unless you count the dresses.

“We still have them,” says Colleen.

“Our mother made them,” says Cathleen. “They look black in the photograph but they’re actually green.”

They were 7 years old in 1967, when Arbus found the girls at a Christmas party for local twins and triplets. Nobody is quite sure how Arbus heard about the gathering, but a few parents obliged when she asked their children to pose. Which is how the Wade sisters wound up on a sidewalk, standing close enough to seem joined at the shoulder, their expression a kind of spectral blank.

The remainder of the article can be found here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051102052.html