Word: arbus
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Instead, each subject appealed to Arbus's sensibility as a unique person who dealt with reality in a specific manner. Her subjects' ways of enduring and coping with life touched off chords in her own psyche. She emphasized external detail and physical pecularities as a sign of mental turmoil festering below...
...people who posed for her can be called freaks in the sense of having abnormal bodies, but clearly they fascinated Arbus by exuding the same heroism that she perceived in genuine freaks...
...very direct, frontal style, Arbus photographed the struggles of those attempting to re-integrate themselves into society and assuage their alienation. She did not deal with those who had already withdrawn--the winos, drunks, and dope freaks. Some altered their lives drastically in order to present a new self-image--changing sex, tattooing a whole body, becoming a human pin cushion with sharp needles jabbed through cheeks, lips, and neck. Others hide deep beneath layers of sequinned veils, Halloween masks, garish sunglasses, or gobs of heavy makeup. Arbus's titles pinpoint exactly the accoutrements used to buttress egos--"A young...
...Arbus's photographs are extremely horrifying and disturbing in their precise attention to detail and the use of strobe flash to delineate textures. Images of a drooling, grimacing baby singe themselves into your retina. A lady's face--swathed in layers of chiffon scarves, wrapped by a gauze turban and netted veil, huge drops of shiny pearls hanging from her ears, and a fluffy fur stole across her chest--peers out over a double chin somehow eerily disembodied...
...Arbus was highly conscious of the camera's ability to record hard visual facts which cannot be ignored. Her style evolved from a grainy picture surface to one of extreme clarity. It dispells any aura of mystery surrounding her subjects that the human eye with its weakness and sympathies allowed to build up. The struggles and anguish these people suffered awed Arbus but she never forsook the objectivity of the lens. She maintained her own perhaps too rigid standards of dealing with reality...