I’m using that aspect of photography to play yet another trick, to draw attention to how things are not what they seem by making something that is not what it seems.

The pictures in my recent work all have an intended subject – say, a portrait of a friend on the balcony – and then they have an unintended interruption that intrudes so completely on the picture that it becomes a subject in its own right.

You can’t look at a double exposure of a lawn party without seeing the double exposure first and foremost – the mistakes are loud, and assert themselves.

In the paintings, mischance becomes the subject. There’s something absurd and obstinate about laboring to perfectly replicate a mistake, and that gives the paintings a charge that the photographs don’t have. 

[TEXT/VERSO]

This + the next one are of Bill + Earl on a sand dune.

Can’t figure out why the waves unless it’s the heat?

Do [sic] have any idea?

WHITE SANDS

The paintings are reservoirs of time and concentration, where everything is made on purpose. They are slow and quiet and made over many months.

They have to be this way - small and concentrated – in order to get under the skin a little, to disorient a little, to ask that you look closer, and look again, like I do.

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.