Diane Arbus: “The gap between intention and effect”

I‘ve just read and went through Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph , picking up many valuable quotes. In the few of them below Arbus discusses the intriguing gap between intention and effect, as applicable to either the objects of photographs or to her own practice. Although we can all probably confess in trying to produce or attain a certain effect with a varying degree of success, the following quotes from Arbus should explain why it may be better to improvise and to rely on what one has already got.

“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way, and that’s what people observe. You see someone in the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know, it really is fantastic that we look like this, and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world, and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it“.

And, miraculously, “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be“. “The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we’re not normally subject to. I mean that we don’t subject each other to“.

A propos photography, the gap between intention and effect could occur because “the camera is something of a nuisance in a way. It’s recalcitrant. It’s determined to do one thing, and you may want to do something else. You have to fuse what you want and what the camera wants“. Hence, “I work with awkwardness. By that I mean that I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself“. Yet at the same time “there is a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge“.

In the end, “the thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way“. Consequently, “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“.

For Arbus, “the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated“. Perhaps, for this reason – as well as thanks to camera’s character of its own – “I have never taken a picture I wanted to take. They’re always better or worse“.