What could I have been thinking? How oddly I dressed back then? Was it difficult to live back then? These are the questions I ask of the wax dummies of historical figures when I tour their homes. Inevitably, especially with the passage of time, when we look at photos or take photos, we traipse through the different worlds of our different selves, looking and wondering, yes, like a tourist. “Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually one’s own.” I was nothing but a random collector of the odd, the discarded, the scribbles on lonely walls. Everything was beautiful, sexual, available to my view. This is the joy I always felt when I walked the city with a camera dangling from my neck. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’” “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. To look into freaks’ eyes and see a normal, everyday person–hey, just like me–is the revelation. Isn’t that her message? I suppose it’s easy to look at Arbus’s photos and think of how separate her subjects are from us.

Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman’s democratic vista), everybody is shown to look the same.”īut in Arbus’s sameness, we’re really all freaks. “Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America.

“The subjects of Arbus’s photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village,” Sontag writes.

A collection of quotes and thoughts upon randomly picking up On Photography one evening while killing time…

Sontag on photography