That was what I had always suspected, until I read “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer,” by Arthur Lubow (Ecco). So why did Arbus pick the shot in which he tightens his mouth into a stretched-out grimace, cupping one hand into an upturned claw while the other grips a grenade? Isn’t he just making sport, or doing an impersonation of someone-an actor in a monster movie, say-consumed by sudden dread? Might Arbus, in short, be guilty of rigging the evidence to fit a mood, making fear out of fun? Most of the time, he looks jaunty and self-possessed, and you can count the missing teeth in his grin. There are eleven images, and in six of them he stands with hands on hips. (It is reprinted in “Revelations,” a hefty and absorbing volume published in 2003 to accompany an Arbus retrospective.) Colin is dressed in shorts and suspenders which lend him a Teutonic air, and he is happy to strike a pose. We have a contact sheet of the pictures that she took that day.
Who is this kid, and what is he doing with a weapon, even a fake one, in Central Park? Well, his name is Colin Wood, and Arbus met him there in early 1962, when he was seven. Last year, another print of it, this one signed by the artist, fetched seven hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. At Christie’s, in 2007, “Child with a toy hand grenade” sold for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. The swell has never slowed, and prices have followed suit. Why splurge? The Museum of Modern Art was more daring in 1964, it had acquired seven Arbus photos, including “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.” Not until the aftermath of Arbus’s death, however, in 1971, and the retrospective of her work at moma the following year, did public fascination start to seethe, swelling far beyond the bounds of her profession. Wiser counsels prevailed, however, and a few months later the museum decided to take only two. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to buy three photographs by Diane Arbus, for seventy-five dollars each. Arbus at the “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1967.
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