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I remember seeing this book at my aunt and uncle's house when I was quite young (maybe 5 or 6). Flipping its pages as an adult is quite an experience, but as a child I was equal parts totally enthralled, disturbed, confused and yet completely smitten. I remember becoming quite familiar with the book's many characters, and always looked at this book when I visited their house.
When I started experimenting in photography in my mid-teens, I became re-aquainted with it from visiting bookstores and libraries, and through art history courses.
Her images I think speak more about who she is than who her subjects are, but in a way that is brutally revealing. On the surface, these photographs represent a cross-section of fringe society, with all of its inherant complexity and grit. Cross dressers, midgets, nudists, drug addicts, "dancers" and the like. But they become quite revealing about her psyche during the period she was creating this amazing body of work.
She approaches each subject not at a distance, but with the sensitivity and affection of someone who really cares and is invested in these relationships. She lived with a few of these people, hung out with many others...it was the kind of company she prefered, even after being raised in a very wealthy Jewish family who owned a department store.
The images are confrontational, sensational, unnerving, and a little disturbing. And some have really become icons of modern photography (the boy holding the grenade, the triplets on their bed, and many more).
But what really affected me the most was the exerps collected posthumously in the beginning of the book, in which Arbus describes her method and some of the mantras of her craft. There are so many powerful statements in this preface, all of which further support the understanding of her importance in the medium. Two of her most powerful statements:
"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. I have never taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse."
"I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them."
These statements really speak volumes about the responsibilty of an artist, and how everybody has a different slant about what's in front of them. Her words occasionally provide fuel for me to take initiative in my own work and take more risks and less excuses.
Definately of of the finest groups of photographs in modern art history. Hugely influential and succesful, and totally unequalled in its genre (except maybe by Nan Goldin).