The Art of Difference

The story Diane Arbus told with her camera was about shape-shifting: in order to understand difference one had to not only not dismiss it, but try to become it. “I don’t like to arrange things,” she once said. “If I stand in front of something, instead of

via The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/08/diane-arbus-art-of-difference/

Both he and Arbus used the word “freaks” to describe their subjects (a word I found disparaging and objected to, albeit silently in his presence). But Arbus’s subjects were unlike Mitchell’s: her photographs showed them pursuing their otherness with a fierce velocity that had little in common with his ultimately more assimilated characters, seen through the skein of his elegant and sometimes ironical prose.