Thursday, June 10, 2010

DAY SIXTEEN: DIANE ARBUS
















Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people "(dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers ) or else of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal to the normal eye. A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid... that she would be known simply as 'the photographer of freaks'; however, that term has been used repeatedly to describe her. This description of such a profound photographer stems from a fear from people who fail to understand the beauty in the unusual. These people are not freaks, they are extraordinary human beings.

It is as Oscar Wilde states in the preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray; "The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."

Arbus was outside of normality. She went above and beyond, breaking rules and conventions to become who she really was. This takes guts and a lot of strength, but sometimes you have to have to say "Fuck society, I'm going to do it my way." She did and she made a mark on the world.

TO FIND BEAUTIFUL MEANINGS IN BEAUTIFUL THINGS, CLICK HERE

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