Rating: 
Summary: Very Intriguing!
Review: The photography of Diane Arbus has always intrigued me. Her photographs are beautiful to me not because of the composition or lighting or any tools a photographer might use. They intrigue me because of her subject matter and even more so because of the intentions behind her subject matter. She takes pictures of people that are not considered beautiful, people that are "freaks" or "weirdos", or in some way different. She wants the viewer to identify with her subject in some way. In a way she takes the ugly, the thing that you're afraid to look at on the street and forces you to look at it and beyond that see it as art. She is "not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like". I agree with her purpose. It is best to show thing as they really are and to photograph something familiar or something often looked at is sort of boring to me. For her, taking pictures was not about the final image - because she believed that anything you plan never turns out the way you intend anyways - but it was about the experience. It was about learning and making connections with her subjects. This was interesting to me because I never thought of photography that way. Mostly when I photograph I am so concerned with the final product, but now I realize that I actually enjoy the process of taking the pictures and dislike the developing. So I see photography in the same way, it is some how meditative and the actual action of photographing helps me release a certain kind of creative energy that I harbor.
Rating:
Summary: Very Intriguing!
Review: The photography of Diane Arbus has always intrigued me. Her photographs are beautiful to me not because of the composition or lighting or any tools a photographer might use. They intrigue me because of her subject matter and even more so because of the intentions behind her subject matter. She takes pictures of people that are not considered beautiful, people that are "freaks" or "weirdos", or in some way different. She wants the viewer to identify with her subject in some way. In a way she takes the ugly, the thing that you're afraid to look at on the street and forces you to look at it and beyond that see it as art. She is "not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like". I agree with her purpose. It is best to show thing as they really are and to photograph something familiar or something often looked at is sort of boring to me. For her, taking pictures was not about the final image - because she believed that anything you plan never turns out the way you intend anyways - but it was about the experience. It was about learning and making connections with her subjects. This was interesting to me because I never thought of photography that way. Mostly when I photograph I am so concerned with the final product, but now I realize that I actually enjoy the process of taking the pictures and dislike the developing. So I see photography in the same way, it is some how meditative and the actual action of photographing helps me release a certain kind of creative energy that I harbor.
Rating: 
Summary: the normalcy in life's freaks, the freakishness in normalcy
Review: This collection of 81 black and white photographs by Diane Arbus was edited and designed by her daughter, Doon and friend Marvin Israel and published in 1972 after her suicide the previous year. The photographs are preceeded by text of tape recordings of classes that the photographer gave the year she died, as well as excerpts from interviews and some of her own writings on photography. The text illuminates Arbus' concerns about her art and her subjects. Although she did do studies of objects, such as Disneyland, a hotel lobby, and a Xmas tree, Arbus was more interested in people, in particular the kind of people she had never seen before. Coming from a wealthy Park Avenue background, existing in an unreal environment, cocooned from adversity, Arbus felt her immunity painful, which explains her attraction to marginalised groups. One can compare Arbus' studies to those of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe moved from harsh presentations of marginalised gay men's sexuality to soft focus celebrity portraiture. Arbus moved in the opposite direction, from glamour fashion photography with her then husband Alan, to her reality marginalised portraiture. Arbus' experience with fashion provides her composition and while her camera can scrutinise, her photos never patronise. Perhaps this is due to the complicitity apparent from the subjects. These people want to be photographed, and Arbus presents them with dignity. But what makes them compelling is the what Arbus described as the gap between intention and effect, what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. Sometimes, often the thing we see is sadness, but we can't laugh at these people because they are so unguarded. Arbus' photos aren't posed. She tells us how she arranged her view rather than arranging her subject, so that they are planned observations. The photographs here taken between 1962 and 1970 cover the range of her interest in marginalised subjects including the freaks she classified as "aristocrats" who were born with their trauma so had passed their test in life, and made her feel a mix of shame and awe. Midgets, dwarfs, nudists, transvestites, identical twins and triplets, a giant with his parents, musclemen, carnival performers, a woman with her baby monkey, and the untitled retards. This is the world Arbus entered into. It's hard not to consider her suicide as being related to the subjects of her work. Arbus was interested in exposing the flaw, and her camera gave her licence to privacy, however the cold scrutiny of her camera may have been too much when it was focused upon herself. The self portraits I have seen show her looking uncomfortable, the photographer clearly lacking the skills she would apply to her own subjects. There is a rumour that Arbus set up a camera to photograph her own death, mentioned in the Patricia Bosworth biography, though no evidence was found when her body was discovered. Like the great ones, Arbus received acclaim posthumously, and this book is an ode to her genius.
Rating: 
Summary: You've got to be kidding
Review: This is collection of grainy and VERY BIZZARE black and white photos. I've seen better results from a point and shoot. If your expecting one of those beautiful collections of an artisit's work, SURPRISE! The true value of this work is somewhere between disguarded photos and the ones hid under the bed of an andolescent. Thank you Amazon for your liberal return policy.
Rating:
Summary: Justin Bland's Opinion
Review: This is one bizarre book. I love it. The photos are everything from odd to mind-blowing to completeley insane. This is the only book of it's kind that I know of. Its really bizarre. If you want to know whats in it I'll tell you, but I can't hope to represet it's charm altogether accuratley or completely. There are about eighty 8x8 black and white photos of completkey bizarre subjects. Almost completley of people. Everyone has something strange or outstanding about them. Some are obviously wierd, like retatded people and midets. Some are just subtley wierd. Every single photo is a good one. Looking through the pages you just wonder how she managed to get so many great shots without sparing any emotion. Also, there is an excelent foreward by Diane Arbus that explanes her presomal life phelosophy, life experiences, and other stuff. It is written verry casualy and un-traditionally, and is a knockout. Anyone who is interested in some prime people watching should buy this book right now without a second thought. It is realy worth a lot more than the price - I'm not Kidding.
Rating:
Summary: Seeing beauty and the beauty of seeing
Review: When we see flaws in others, why is it so hard to look away? Does it make us feel somehow better about ourselves? Maybe that is the case for some, but not Diane Arbus. What her photography attempts to convey is that beauty can be found, even in the most unexpected of places. Although, her ideal of beauty isn't the kind that compels people to go to a plastic surgeon to make themselves "pretty", or more pleasing to the eyes of other, it is nonetheless valid because it goes much deeper than the hollow image that beauty has become in contemporary society to many. Indeed, just one look at her work will illustrate that as she simply prefers the common people who are found everywhere from suburban lawns to skid rows, strip clubs to asylums, dance halls to darkened rooms. Perhaps, most important to her vision is that these people have flaws, just as everyone does and it is precisely these "flaws" that attracted Arbus' to the subjects portrayed in this collection.
Although many of her subjects inhabit places that many of us would rather avoid, often coming to us in nightmares from which we struggle to awaken, by the snapping of the shutter somehow they are made real to us, safe, unassuming and even fragile. Looking, for instance, at a photograph entitled "Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th st, NYC" my initial thoughts are flooded by a kind of morbid curiosity, but then as I continue to gaze and I notice their, eyes and faces, their expressions, and their willingness to share their lives with us; yes we, the same people who so often greets them with cold stares and cruel words. Diane Arbus was able to see the beauty in that kind of courage, a kind that would make many of us shudder, and her photos reveals to us the brilliance of it. Like a flower sprouting from the mire and destruction of a battlefield, Arbus' photography hits us hard, but leaves no bruises. Hers are images that when viewing for only a moment, we will remember for years.
Through her depictions of dwarfs, giants, drag queens, nudists, crying children, transvestites, lonely women, weathered faces and mental patients, we are reminded that beauty can often be found where it is least expected. But this is not the beauty of celebrity or fame, perfection or contriviality, but that found in their shadows, in the dark and hidden places that exist everywhere and at all times. Through her daring and revolutionary work Arbus struggled to teach us how to see this often tortured beauty, and I think above all else her work accomplishes that, but only if we open our eyes and our minds and let that beauty in.
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