Genius of Photography 5 - We Are Family

1.Who said “ The camera gave me the license to strip away what you want people to know about you, to reveal what you can’t help people knowing about you”, and when was it said?

Photographer Diane Arbus said these words. It was said in New York in the early 1960’s

2.Do photographers tend to prey on vulnerable people?

Photographers always looked for some sort of marginalised subjects, it might mean that they might prey on vulnerable people.

3.Who is Colin Wood?

Colin Wood was a son of tennis player Sidney Wood, and he was in Diane Arbus’s famous photograph – “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park”. She managed to get the unusual and fascinating face expression from the boy.

4.Why do you think Diane Arbus committed suicide?

The lack of acceptation for herself has driven her to commit suicide in my opinion. The fact that she wished to be someone else throughout her whole life didn’t obviously bring her the happiness she needed.

She seemed to be quite interested in photography but I guess this wasn’t enough for her to cherish her own life and identity.

5.Why and how did Larry Clark shoot “Tulsa”?

Tulsa was Larry Clark’s book published in 1971. It was series of photographs based on his own life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It showed an inside point of view on life of drug addicts. He made photography look as personal as the written diary.

6.Try to explain the concept of “confessional photography”, and what is the “impolite genre”?

Impolite genre was something created by Larry Clark’s photographs; it makes photography look more informal and more intimate. Confessional photography I would say is something like telling the story about your life and surroundings throughout photographs, which is a quite personal subject for some.

7.What will Araki not photograph, and why?

Technically, there is nothing Araki would not photograph, however he says he won’t shoot something he doesn’t want to remember.

8.What is the premise of Postmodernism?

 It is that media influenced our lives and culture, giving us ideas of how people live. The ideas of individual’s life are made up by the myths from media, and we loose that sense of personal identity trying to be someone else. This obviously affect portraiture photography the most.