I think I first read about Diane Arbus (1923-1971), when already in England. As Frank van Riper indicates in his article, she indeed is often introduced as someone who documented “the lives of the freaks“, with little else to go beyond that. Whilst it is possible to get too agreed with this image of Arbus, already her Aperture monograph has shown a complex artistic character through the numerous citations from Arbus’s talks and interviews. The book has provided my personal quotations notepad with many valuable additions, some of which I gathered in the post Diane Arbus: “The Gap Between Intention and Effect”. At the same time, studying the photos in the book and contemplating on the excerpts from her talks led to the lengthy philosophical meditation on the subject of human identities and language.
From the book:
“I suppose a lot of these observations are bound to be after the fact. I mean they’re nothing you can do to yourself to get yourself to work. You can’t make yourself work by putting up something beautiful on the wall or by knowing yourself. Very often knowing yourself isn’t really going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes it’s going to leave you kind of blank“.
“What’s thrilling to me about what’s called technique is that it comes from some mysterious deep place“.
“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again“.
“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough“.