Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971)
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
I mean, if you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t.
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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.
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
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.
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
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Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal.” A friend said that Arbus said that she was “afraid . . . that she would be known simply as ‘the photographer of freaks'”; however, that phrase has been used repeatedly to describe her. (Wikipedia)
In 1972, a year after she committed suicide, Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale.
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(Lumonics Light and Sound Gallery)
