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“... with knowing looks, though reading the book did little to make me feel like a divinity. ‘Diane Arbus’s unsettling photographs of freaks and eccentrics were already being heralded in the art world before she killed herself in 1971’: so begins this strikingly predestinarian biography, enunciating in its first sentence the twin destinies of its ...”

“... by it, and wasn’t ready for it, recoiled from it and deplored it, all for the same reasons. Diane Arbus loved Freaks. She watched it ‘innumerable times’, Arthur Lubow writes in his biography, ‘often introducing people she knew to its pleasures’. ‘She said she had to see it every time it played,’ one of those friends recalled. As a ...”

“... If it is too often said about Diane Arbus that she photographs freaks, it does at least suggest that we know what normal people are like, what people look like when they are not odd. It is reassuring to be reminded that we know a freak when we see one. There are, of course, points of view, angles from which we can all look like freaks to ourselves; and Arbus is unusually eloquent about this and about the way the camera can pick up the unwanted perspective ...”

“... people in her audiences; like most freaks, she has cultivated a blank, unseeing stare.’ After Diane Arbus had read McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, the book in which these pieces appeared, she called Mitchell up and asked him about his subjects. She had become interested in freaks and wanted to photograph Miss Barnell, but she had died by then. No ...”

“... which face, hands and legs emerge. The impression of solidity was partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head ...”

“... took place. In 1967 Szarkowski had curated an exhibition that showed work by Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, all of whom severely undermined existing notions of what photographic art could and should be in much the way Eggleston does. Yet when you imagine their pictures in colour you see that it would diminish them. Imagine ...”

“... working-class family and spent only a year at art college. Her tutor at Parsons School of Design, Diane Arbus, told her she spoke like Dorothy Parker and suggested she become a writer instead. Kruger didn’t exactly take Arbus’s advice, but it left its mark. By 1969 she was working as a freelance picture editor and ...”

“... Joyce Carol Oates writes from the point of view of a Jeffrey Dahmer-like monster. Like a Diane Arbus with her camera as a shield, these women use fiction to enter the subterranean spaces of the modern city, the physical and sexual spaces forbidden to women. Frannie has rough sex with NYPD Detective Jimmy Malloy, who likes to hold her down and ...”

“... face. Winogrand captures the exact moment of the glasses coming off. Lee Friedlander – who, with Diane Arbus, was featured alongside Winogrand in the breakthrough New Documents show at MoMA in 1967 – described him as ‘a bull of a man and the world his china shop’. So this baseball player becomes Winogrand’s surrogate, bustling and striding ...”

“... built on Evans’s book, but in some ways, which Evans surely recognised, surpassed it. Diane Arbus, another photographer he championed, also rose to prominence. Joseph Mitchell once told me that Evans, at a certain point, ‘couldn’t see things anymore. Diane Arbus came along, and she could see ...”

“... assaulting his keepers, he is photographed from the top through a lens which makes him look like a Diane Arbus freak, and is also allowed to overact copiously, imitating Brando imitating Olivier. This is great fun if your sense of irony is in good health; probably tiresome if you’re not in the mood for parody, or don’t believe that parody can deliver ...”

“... less important ones. In On Photography Sontag questioned, in relation to the strange staring of Diane Arbus and the sentimentality of the famous 1960s exhibition The Family of Man, what we have the right to observe and the value of our observations: ‘The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether ...”

“... He purposely used a plate camera and a tripod, and made no secret of what he was doing. And Diane Arbus (another New York photographer whom Conrad does not mention) had a relationship with her subjects which may have involved pretences, but certainly not the pretence that she was not really taking pictures. Then one finds that Conrad, when he comes ...”

“... other patients are worse off than he is). A Fourth of July outing for the patients is a potential Diane Arbus moment shot in cheerful Kodak colour. ‘A Frisbee bonked one depressed guy on the head. He paid no attention.’ One of the inmates is a Dominican woman named Conchita, who’s married to an abusive creep. Post-rehab, Conchita shows up at ...”

“... Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly ...”