Diane Arbus - Masters of Photography Part 3
“I didn’t want to be told that I was terrific. I had a sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn’t worth doing.”
“I like to put things up around my bed all the time. Pictures of mine that I like, and other things. And I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it, it’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way. I suppose a lot of these observations are bound to be after the fact.
I mean, there’s 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 going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes, it’s going to leave you kind of blank. Like here I am, there’s a me, I’ve got a history, I’ve got things which are mysterious to me in the world, and I’ve got things that bug me in the world, but there are moments when all that doesn’t seem to avail.”
Marvin Israel “Each photograph for Diane was an event. And it could be said, although it could be argued, that for Diane the most valuable things wasn’t the photograph itself, the art object, it was the event, the experience. I mean she was absolutely moved by every single event that took place. And she would narrate them, in detail, and she wouldn’t just say I took a photograph of so and so in their home, but it was the going there, the being there, the dialogue that came back and forth, the moments, of even just waiting, of no talk, it was an incredibly personal thing.
And once you, once you become an adventurer, and Diane was really an adventurer, she went places where no one had really gone too, they were scary. And once you’ve become an adventurer, you’re geared to adventure, you seek out further adventure, and your life is really based upon it. And I’ve said the photograph is like her trophy. It’s what she received as a reward for this adventure, just like some guy climbs mount Everest, and he has a flag in his hand. You see him there. Diane has the photograph.”
“I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between action and repose. I don’t mean to make a big deal of it, it was just like an expression of something I didn’t see or wouldn’t have seen.”
“One of the excitements of strobe at one time, was that you were essentially blind at the moment you took the picture. I mean it alters light enormously, and reveals things you don’t see. In fact, that’s what made me really sick of it. I began to miss light as it really is, and now I’m trying to get back to some kind of obscurity, where at least there’s normal obscurity. Lately I’ve been struck by how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. It’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”
“What’s thrilling to me about what’s called technique, I hate to call it that, because it sounds like something up your sleeve, but, what moves me about it 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 mainly from some deep choices somebody has made. That take a long time, and keep haunting you.”
“Invention is mostly this subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular. Invention has a lot to do with a certain kind of light that some people have, with the print quality, and the choice of subject. It’s a million choices you make. It’s luck in a sense. Or even ill luck. Some people hate a kind of complexity, others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. I mean, we’ve all got an identity, you can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.”
“I think the camera is a kind of nuisance in a way. It’s recalcitrant. It’s determined to do one thing and you may want it to do something else. You have to fuse what you want and what the camera wants. It’s like a horse. Well, that’s a bad comparison because I’m not much of a horse back rider. But I mean, you get to learn what it will do. I’ve worked with a couple of them. One will be terrific in certain situations, or I can make it be terrific. Another will be very dumb. But, sometimes I really like that kind of dumbness. It’ll do, you know. I get a great sense that they are different from me. I don’t feel that total identity with the machine. I mean I can work it fine, although I’m not so great actually. Sometimes, when I’m winding it, it’ll get stuck or something will go wrong, and I start clicking everything and suddenly very often it’s all right again. That’s my feeling about machines. If you sort of look the other way they’ll get fixed, except for certain ones.”
“Very often when you go to photograph, it’s like you’re going for an event, say it’s a beauty contest. You picture it in your mind a little bit, that there’ll be these people who are the judges, and they’ll be choosing the winner from all these contestants. And then you go there and it’s not like that at all. Very often an event happens scattered, and the account of it will look to you in your mind, like it will be straight and photographable but actually one person is over there, and another person is over here, and they don’t get together. Even when you go to do a family, you want to show the whole family, but how often are the mother and father and the two kids all in the same side of the room, unless you tell them to go there?”
“I work from an awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it I arrange myself.”
Posted 2 years ago
