Diane Arbus - Part 4
- There were days that I just couldn’t do it. And then there were days I could. And then having done it a little I could do it more.
- They were very much like sculptures in a funny way.
- You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.
- I have this funny thing where I’m never afraid when I’m looking into the ground glass. This person could be approaching with a gun or something like that and I’d have my eyes glued to the finder and it wasn’t like I was really vulnerable.
- There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean, everyone knows that you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some slight magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.
- I used to think that I was shy and I got incredibly persistent in the shyness. I remember enjoying immensely the situation of being put off and having to wait. I still do. I guess I use the waiting time for a kind of nervousness. For getting calm or I don’t know, just waiting. It isn’t such a productive time, it’s a really boring time. … I learned to love that experience, because whilst I was bored I was also entranced. I mean, it was boring, but it was also mysterious. People would pass. And also, I had a sense of what to photograph, but I couldn’t actually photograph. Which I think is quite enjoyable sometimes. 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 just 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.
- Szarkowski: So much of photography has been concerned, perhaps especially in recent decades with making the photograph look good. Almost with a kind of visual athletics perhaps. With formal games that can be played so well, so enchantingly, so fascinatingly with photography. Or with more peripheral problems, such as, how to make photography look like other fine arts. Diane was a, Edward Steichen said once that photography was born perfect and Diane knew that. She knew that at it’s absolutely simplest, most primitive, most direct, unembellished way the problem for the photographer was simply to understand absolutely and with precision, sensitivity, and with complete clarity what it was that was out there that you were looking at. What were the secret meanings that exists wherever, wherever one looks. If one looks with enough intelligence, and enough with, and precise enough intuitions. The influence that she’s had has been simply enormous because all of us when we first looked at Diane’s pictures, it was almost as though, it was almost as though we were starting again as if we were back in the days of the daguerreotype, back in the days of Matthew Brady. It was a new fresh, unused medium again. All the fanciness had been stripped away. All that was left was the marvellous, clear, errorless experience of life. Absolutely without any interposition of concern for affect, in a sense, without any concern for art. That’s not, of course, that’s not really true. She was always an artist and she knew she was an artist. Her way of being an artist, was to conceal that fact as fully as she could, from us when we looked at the pictures.
- The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way. One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or vice a versa, what comes out is not what you put in. I’ve never taken a photograph that I’ve intended. They are always better or worse.
- For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture and more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print. But I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think that what it is is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it is of is always more remarkable than what it is.
- I do believe I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle, and a little embarrassing to me. But I really believe that there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them.
Her thoughts are so opposed to those of Winogrand. Her pictures are exactly the same.
Posted 2 years ago
