CHILD WITH A TOY HAND GRENADE IN CENTRAL PARK, N.Y.C.
DIANE ARBUS, 1962
Alright, start with the hand that isn't holding the grenade. Fingers spread. Bent back like a claw. That's the hand everybody remembers. Then the face. Eyes too wide. Mouth pulled back from his teeth. And the grenade is just hanging there at his side. Small. Loose in his hand. Somehow the calmest thing in the picture. He's seven years old. Alone on a path in Central Park. One strap falling off his shoulder. Socks down around his ankles. And the usual story is that Arbus caught something real leaking out of him. Some little private nightmare. Except the kid has a name. Colin Wood. His dad was Sidney Wood. Won Wimbledon. Which feels like it belongs in a completely different story. But there it is. Colin grew up, and years later a reporter asked him what was happening that afternoon. He said he was copying a face he'd seen in war movies. He loved watching them back then. He was doing a bit. And the rest of the roll pretty much proves it. Frame after frame of a regular kid in the park. Grinning. Goofing around. Showing off. Arbus picked this one. But Colin said something else. She catches me in a moment of exasperation. It's true, I was exasperated. So the famous face is a seven-year-old doing his war-movie act. Which should ruin the picture. It doesn't. Because then he talked about what the rest of his life felt like around then. His parents had divorced. There was, he said, a general feeling of loneliness. A sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding.