Design Basics Used to Create Balance
The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.
––Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus was a highly original photographer who has greatly influenced the course of contemporary photography. In her Photography: A Cultural History (2002), Mary Warner Marien writes:
Arbus turned normalcy on its head, making the ordinary bizarre and naturalizing the unusual. In her photographs of people, many of them made while she roamed the streets of New York, clothes and cosmetics are futile efforts to camouflage psychic emptiness or damage. When Arbus photographed children, she revealed them as little versions of bad-tempered, mean-spirited adults. […] On the other hand, her photographs of people at the margins of society, such as female impersonators, show them to be more virtuous for having unmasked their subjective inclinations. For Arbus, marginal people were symbols for her own psychological fragility and trauma (p. 352).
The thematic power of Arbus’s work is based on the masterful composition of her subject matter, balancing key elements within a square frame format, which is uniquely identified with her mature style.
