A sample of quotes from the beginning of the book
Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinise reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.
The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we're not normally subject to. I mean that we don't subject each other to. We're nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us. It's a little bit cold, a little bit harsh.
Now I don't mean to say that all photographs have to be mean. Sometimes they show something really nicer in fact than what you felt, or oddly different. But in a way this scrutiny has to do with not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like.
Very often knowing yourself isn't really going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes it's going to leave you kind of blank. Like, here I am, there is a me, I've got a history, I've got things that are mysterious to me in the world, I've got things that bug me in the world. But there are moments when all that doesn't seem to avail.
Strobe light - blind to the moment of photographing
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. We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away. I think it's the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
I work from 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.
I have never taken a picture I've intended. They're always bettor or worse.
Book edited and designed by Doon Arbus, daughter + Marvin Israel friend. New York City, 1972 1973
ISBN 0-900406-84-4
post - 012
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Diane Arbus [book] quotes
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