Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition [Hardcover]

A rather interesting, yet democratic photographer, Diane Arbus was an individual who was never afraid. She was a motivational and influential photographer whose life possessed no limits. Her subject matter was unique in that the pictures she took were on the abnormalities of life. These subjects centered mostly on freaks such as midgets, drag queens, giants, hookers, nudists, and drugees. Taking pictures such as these shows that she was a person who was never afraid to display the irregularities of life to the world around us.

Diane Arbus lived life one day, one moment at a time. In this book, I get the feeling that her pictures show a meaning in the way she captured life, not just focusing on the photograph alone. Her subjects depicted on each page makes the viewer wonder how she got herself as well as her subjects in that position. Were they cooperative or not? Did she tell them to strike a pose or did they do it on their own? Each of her pictures in the book have a story behind it and some would seem more interesting than others. From her book, I see that the significance of her life and her photography is through this quote "The thing that's most important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way."

The photography of Diane Arbus has always intrigued me. Her photographs are beautiful to me not because of the composition or lighting or any tools a photographer might use. They intrigue me because of her subject matter and even more so because of the intentions behind her subject matter. She takes pictures of people that are not considered beautiful, people that are "freaks" or "weirdos", or in some way different. She wants the viewer to identify with her subject in some way. In a way she takes the ugly, the thing that you're afraid to look at on the street and forces you to look at it and beyond that see it as art. She is "not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like". I agree with her purpose. It is best to show thing as they really are and to photograph something familiar or something often looked at is sort of boring to me.

For her, taking pictures was not about the final image - because she believed that anything you plan never turns out the way you intend anyways - but it was about the experience. It was about learning and making connections with her subjects. This was interesting to me because I never thought of photography that way. Mostly when I photograph I am so concerned with the final product, but now I realize that I actually enjoy the process of taking the pictures and dislike the developing. So I see photography in the same way, it is some how meditative and the actual action of photographing helps me release a certain kind of creative energy that I harbor.

When we see flaws in others, why is it so hard to look away? Does it make us feel somehow better about ourselves? Maybe that is the case for some, but not Diane Arbus. What her photography attempts to convey is that beauty can be found, even in the most unexpected of places. Although, her ideal of beauty isn't the kind that compels people to go to a plastic surgeon to make themselves "pretty", or more pleasing to the eyes of other, it is nonetheless valid because it goes much deeper than the hollow image that beauty has become in contemporary society to many. Indeed, just one look at her work will illustrate that as she simply prefers the common people who are found everywhere from suburban lawns to skid rows, strip clubs to asylums, dance halls to darkened rooms. Perhaps, most important to her vision is that these people have flaws, just as everyone does and it is precisely these "flaws" that attracted Arbus' to the subjects portrayed in this collection.
Although many of her subjects inhabit places that many of us would rather avoid, often coming to us in nightmares from which we struggle to awaken, by the snapping of the shutter somehow they are made real to us, safe, unassuming and even fragile. Looking, for instance, at a photograph entitled "Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th st, NYC" my initial thoughts are flooded by a kind of morbid curiosity, but then as I continue to gaze and I notice their, eyes and faces, their expressions, and their willingness to share their lives with us; yes we, the same people who so often greets them with cold stares and cruel words. Diane Arbus was able to see the beauty in that kind of courage, a kind that would make many of us shudder, and her photos reveals to us the brilliance of it. Like a flower sprouting from the mire and destruction of a battlefield, Arbus' photography hits us hard, but leaves no bruises. Hers are images that when viewing for only a moment, we will remember for years.
Through her depictions of dwarfs, giants, drag queens, nudists, crying children, transvestites, lonely women, weathered faces and mental patients, we are reminded that beauty can often be found where it is least expected. But this is not the beauty of celebrity or fame, perfection or contriviality, but that found in their shadows, in the dark and hidden places that exist everywhere and at all times. Through her daring and revolutionary work Arbus struggled to teach us how to see this often tortured beauty, and I think above all else her work accomplishes that, but only if we open our eyes and our minds and let that beauty in.