Diane Arbus
People best know portraits of prostitutes, transvestites, persons with physical deformities, and other unconventional subjects of American photographer Diane Arbus.
Diane Arbus noted dwarfs, giants, and ordinary citizens in poses and settings on the fringes of society.
Arbus used 35-mm cameras to create her early work but adopted the Rolleiflex medium format twin-lens reflex before the 1960s. This format provided a square aspect ratio, higher image resolution, and a waist-level viewfinder, not a standard eye, which allowed Arbus to connect in different ways. Arbus also experimented with the use of flashes in daylight, allowing her to highlight and separate from the background.
In July 1971, Arbus ingested a large quantity of barbiturates and then slashed her wrists to commit suicide in Greenwich Village at the age of 48 years.
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.”
“You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”
“What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.”
“One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”
“What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.”
“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
“... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.”
“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
“If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.”
“...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold. ”
“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”
“One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.”
“The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.”
“My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.”
“There's a quality of legend about freaks.Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
“The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.”