Last week, I wrote my blog post about Alec Soth, whose work is largely inspired by Diane Arbus, so now here I am exploring her work. Arbus was an American photographer and writer who was best known for her black and white photography of deviant and marginal people (like dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers, among others), or of people who, to most, seem ugly or surreal. She believed that a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh” but that very harsh scrutiny revealed the truth; the difference between what people wanted others to see and what they really did see.
Her work has always been controversial and critiqued heavily by art critics and the general public for simply being “the photographer of freaks” and casting her subjects in a negative light, but she's clearly made her mark in photographic history for going outside the box. She once said that her favorite thing is to go where she's never been, and her photography reveals that she followed her curiosity.
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