Word: arbus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Were there certain pairs of pop-culture twins that came to mind when you were writing this book? Someone in some review somewhere mentioned Diane Arbus' photo of those young twins, and that's an iconic image for me. I'm a huge admirer of Diane Arbus. And even though my twins don't look like that and they're older, there's something in the way those two girls look at the camera. With her work, there's always this quality of looking at people maybe you feel you shouldn't be looking...
...Death Becomes Them is about filling in these gaps? Exactly. Each of these characters left not only unanswered questions but unrealized talent and unknown potential as well. We'll never know what else van Gogh might have painted. Or how another Diane Arbus portrait might have turned out. Or how a later Hemingway novel might have read...
...Tommy, the Valentino wannabe, and Yvonne, despair stamped on her prettiness. At the Ritz, bit players become stars for a second, like the toothless gent sucking on a beer bottle. Mackenzie's sense of portraiture is less stark and sensational than that of his contemporaries Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Weegie, less hagiographic than the work of his predecessor Edward Curtis (whose photographs of Amerindians provide the film's opening montage). He just knows how to choose faces, how long to leave them on screen...
...indispensable. For one thing, it brought to American photography the same tragic dimension that American fiction had arrived at long before. It also paved the way for a new kind of documentary photography, one that was more personal and idiosyncratic and much stranger. Because of The Americans, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, virtuosos of the mordant and off-kilter, could take pictures the way they did--and we could understand them...
...from the '50s. I noticed when I was 8 or 9 years old that the photographs were more pleasing and more beautiful than the photographs in the TV Guide or my mother's movie magazines. Vogue in the late '50s was a very sophisticated magazine, with photos by Diane Arbus, [Irving] Penn, Brassai, some of our great photographers...