Diane Arbus

"Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." -diane arbus

I heard about Diane Arbus a year or so ago in an Art History class I took. Her images are the kind of images that stay in your head for a while. They have a haunted feeling about them and force you to wonder and speculate about the subjects. Diane Arbus is known for her portraits of unlikely subjects. She photographed people that seem to be outsiders in society- mental patients, transvestites dwarves, giants, and other subjects that struck her as bizarre or different. After reading a little bit about Diane Arbus, I learned that she suffered from depression and actually committed suicide when she was in her 40's, at the height of her career. I think it is interesting to be introduced to someone's work and then later learn about their life, and see how the two parallel.
I think the main reason I like her pictures so much is because they give off an emotional reaction. There is something uneasy and unsettling about her images that I can't quite put my finger on. I think she was very intentional in the fact that she wanted to capture the bizarre in everything, facial expressions, characters, poses, lifestyles... In one of her most famous images, Child with Toy Grenade, she walked around the boy claiming to find the right angle until the annoyed boy told her to "take the picture already!". She was able to get his maniacal facial expression just as he is becoming frustrated and impatient.

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