A Quote by Amy Arbus

My mother's work has been an enormous influence on me, but not literally. By that I mean, my photographs don't look like hers. That makes it difficult to compare them. What they do share is an emotional intensity.
... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
If you listen to the radio, it's all men who are emotional and women who are sexual. There's nothing wrong with that! It definitely should be the case, but it makes me sad that women are afraid to be emotional because it makes them look weak.
When prayers were ended, and his Mother had wished him good-night with that long steady look of hers which conveyed no expression of the tenderness that was in her heart, but yet had all the intensity of a blessing.
She has been more than a mother than me - not much, but definitely more... She's been an unsolicited stylist, interior decorator and marriage counselor... Admittedly, I found it difficult to share my mother with her adoring fans, who treated her like she was part of their family.
My mother has been a wonderful model for the professional woman - a loving mother dedicated to both her family and her work. She inspired me, made me proud, and developed in me an enormous respect for women in general.
The word "nice" makes me break out in hives. When someone tells me that they think my work is nice I want to take knitting needles and shove them in my ear canals. I have the same almost physical reaction to the word "interesting." The word is vague enough to mean anything and nothing. Like nice, interesting means the reader had zero connection and zero emotional response to anything in the work.
I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
I've been through my fair share of highs and lows. Yes, I've been written off, and it amazes me, and it amuses me, also, when I'm written off by the press cause then I tell them that's just the lull before the storm. And every time I've been down, I've been down, never out. So it just makes me work a lot harder.
I try to be as healthy as possible. But the problem for me is that I'm a huge foodie. I mean, I'm literally passionate about food. I love trying new restaurants, new cuisine. It just makes me really happy. So it's very difficult for me to eat completely healthy.
You have to ask if the country would have been ready for Barack Obama if we hadn't been prepared by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. If they hadn't already been in positions of enormous power and influence - secretary of state, secretary of defence - you know what I mean?
My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, Look at this - Look at that. I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to Look at this - Look at that. If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them - Isn't this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful? - then I've accomplished my purpose.
When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
I have been so incredibly blessed, and I just feel like my calling is to be a missionary and share the gospel... The Lord's given me a platform to stand on and an audience that is listening. I feel like it's so important to share what makes me happy.
I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon sum rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity-the greatest intensity of which I am capable-for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak (to my subconscious mind) that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.
What's important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don't want them to look fabricated.
I don't mean to look scary, it's just kind of what I have to work with. Maybe that's why my tattoos are literally the first thing people Google about me.
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