Diane Arbus Aperture Monograph

‘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.’

‘It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction. The best example I know is when you go to the movies and you see two people in bed, you’re willing to put aside the fact that you perfectly well know that there was a director and a cameraman and assorted lighting people all in that same room and the two people in bed weren’t really alone. But when you look at a photograph, you can never put that aside.

‘A whore I once knew showed me a photo album of Instamatic colour pictures she’d taken of guys she’d picked up. I don’t mean kissing ones. Just guys sitting on beds in motel rooms. I remember one of a man in a bra. He was just a man, the most ordinary, milktoast sort of man, and he had just tried on a bra. Like anybody would try on a bra, like anybody would try on what the other person had that he didn’t have. It was heartbreaking. It was really a beautiful 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.

‘What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin and into someone else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.’

180 pages of 80 black and white photographs with an introductory text edited together from tape recordings of a series of classes Arbus gave in 1971 as well as from interviews and her writings.

Rare first edition of this much reprinted Aperture Monograph. Softcover. 1972.