Forty years after her death, the great photographer remains an enigma. But a new collection of her private thoughts brings her sharply into focus
Arbus On work
I hated painting and I quit right after high school because I was continually told how terrific I was… it made me feel shaky. I remember I hated the smell of the paint and the noise it would make when I put my brush to the paper. Sometimes I wouldn’t really look but just listen to this horrible squish, squish, squish. I didn’t want to be told I was terrific. I had the sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn’t worth doing.
Radio interview with Studs Terkel, 1968
In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things. I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots. Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you were dealing mostly in dark and light, not so much in flesh and blood… It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be…
From ‘Diane Arbus, Aperture, 1972’
They are the proof that something was there and no longer is.Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.
From a letter to Davis Pratt, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, 1971, in response to a request for a brief statement about photographs
On her subjects
I am working on something now, the eccentrics I have so long thought of, or rather people who visibly believe in something everyone doubts, and remembering A Commodity of Dreams [the title of Howard Nemerov’s collected short stories, published by Secker & Warburg, London, 1960] I wondered if there were any such anywhere round your vicinity which would provide me the excuse and oppty for a visit… Any impostors, or people with incredibly long beards, or ones who believe in the imminent end of the world, or are reincarnations or keep lions in their living room or embalmed bodies or even skeletons, or have developed some especial skill like a lady in Florida who is meant to eat and sleep underwater, or affect some remarkable costume or other, or collect things to the point of miserliness? Don’t trouble about it, or bother to answer, unless when you look up from the page the Messiah comes wandering out of the woods…
Letter to Howard Nemerov, her brother,1960
One summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park... The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough amazingly hard-core lesbians. And in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies... I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot. They were a lot like sculptures in a funny way. I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them. You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.
Extracted from 'Diane Arbus: A Chronology', Aperture