“Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw…. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in one way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect.”
DIANE ARBUS
Linked to her interest in this gap between intention and effect is her interest in self invention. Her subjects are often self invented – presenting themselves as something other than they are, for example “ - man being a woman” It’s about how people see themselves; how others see them; and the gap in-between.
It seems from Arbus’s own words that she simply sought to photograph the truth; to show her subjects as they were; as we would see them; without gloss.
“It was Arbus’s great gift that she did not romanticise her subjects.”
She addresses the relationship between the subject and the photographer and how people perceive themselves and want to be perceived.
WEBSITES:
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/01/theory-where-diane-arbus-went.html
"almost all the principals in Arbus's finest portraits are also masked. This is obvious where they cover their faces--with a veil, a concoction of feathers, sunglasses fashioned after swans, the plastic visage of a warty witch--but it is equally true of her posturing transvestites, her gracefully made-up young women of the later '50s, her nudists (whose nudity is not nakedness but a special kind of clothing), and even the Girl with a cigar in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. (1965), who has fled behind the austerity of her own face. Sometimes the mask is nutty (Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C., 1966); sometimes it is appalling (Transvestite at a drag ball, 1970); occasionally it is exquisite (A flower girl at a wedding, Connecticut, 1964). Sometimes it is easy to guess why a person dresses as he does, at other times not. Sometimes the mask slips ominously; sometimes, as with her commanding, inquisitorial Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. (1967), its hold is tight. (11)
What impressed Arbus the most powerfully, though, was less the mask per se than the discrepancy between mask and face. She seems to have been able to tell from a block away ("You see someone on the street and ... what you notice ... is the flaw" (12)) who would be unable to keep from showing what he hoped to protect, and she found an elegant name for this--"the gap between intention and effect," between "what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing." (13) The idea of the gap offers not just a guide to the route Arbus's intuition took; it is also a principle that sets her world apart from the ordinary one."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_42/ai_113389506/
"One thing that stands out for me in Arbus's work is the use of masks and artificial faces. But there is also a more general sense of the secret, of something withheld, so that faces look masklike because they hold back as much as they reveal, especially when the face is not animated--when it is just staring, or without that engagement you're familiar with in photographs. It's interesting how she used the mask in the untitled 1970-71 series of mentally handicapped people, in which the subjects have young minds trapped in mature bodies. There's the idea of role-playing but they're adults."
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/10/theory-untitled-by-diane-arbus-review.html
"Even the ordinary half-masks that cover the eyes and the nose meld into the women's faces. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the mask ends and the real face begins. In one image, it's hard to tell whether the woman is wearing a mask or if it's her real face. Another woman wears her mask upside-down and it hardly appears to matter. It seems natural. There is a sense that wearing a mask is important to these people who because of their impairment look different from many of us. Are they wearing the masks to hide from us? Are they wearing them to pretend they are like us?"
"We can stare at these portraits in a way that we couldn't stare at these women and girls if we met them on the street. We can be fearful and curious and safe all at once. They are Other."
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