Diane Arbus (1923-1971)
"I work from awkwardness."


Editor’s note: Since most people are familiar with Diane Arbus, I thought I'd just present text compiled from tape recordings of a series of classes she gave in 1971, as well as interviews and some of her own writings. There are also several good books and Web sites about her if you are interested in finding out more...

"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been. For me there's just something about going into somebody else's house. When it comes time to go, if I have to take a bus to somewhere or if I have to take a cab uptown, it's like I've got a blind date. It's always seemed something like that to me. And sometimes I have the sinking feeling of, Oh God it's time and I really don't want to go. And then, once I'm on my way, something terrific takes over about the sort of queasiness of it and how there's absolutely no method of control.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You're crazy.” Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Actually they tend to like me. I'm extremely likable with them. I think I'm kind of two-faced. I'm very ingratiating. It really kind of annoys me. I'm just sort of a little too nice. Everything is Oooo. I hear myself saying, 'How terrific,' and there's this woman making a face. I really mean it's terrific. I don't mean I wish I looked like that. I don't mean I wish my children looked like that. I don't mean in my private life I want to kiss you. But I mean that's amazingly undeniably something.

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.

Nudist camps was a terrific subject for me. I've been to three of them over a period of years. The first time I went was in 1963 when I stayed a whole week and that was really thrilling. It was the seediest camp and for that reason, for some reason, it was also the most terrific. It was really falling apart. The place was mouldy and the grass wasn't growing.

I had always wanted to go but I sort of didn't dare tell anybody. The director met me at the bus station because I didn't have a car, so I got in his car and I was very nervous. He said, 'I hope you realize that you've come to a nudist camp.' Well, I hope I realized I had. So we were in total agreement there. And then he gave me this speech saying, 'You'll find the moral tone here is higher than that of the outside world.' His rational for this had to do with the fact that the human body is really not as beautiful as it's cracked up to be and when you look at it, the mystery is taken away.

They have these rules. I remember this one place there were two grounds for expulsion. A man could get expelled if he got an erection or either sex could get expelled for something like staring. They had a phrase for it. I mean you were allowed to look at people but you weren't allowed to somehow make a big deal of it. The first man I saw was mowing his lawn.

You think you're going to feel a little silly walking around with nothing on but your camera. But that part is really sort of fun. It just takes a minute, you learn how to do it, and then you're a nudist. You may think you're not but you are.

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 hate the idea of composition. I don't know what good composition is. I mean I guess I must know something about it from doing it a lot and feeling my way into it and into what I like. Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness. Composition is like that.

It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.

For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print but I do not have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what it's about. I mean it has to be of something. And what's it's of it is always more remarkable that what it is."

Thanks to The Estate of Diane Arbus and the book Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph