Photographs by Diane ArbusAfterword by Doon Arbus In these photographs Arbus achieves a lyricism, an emotional purity, that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. Untitled may well be Arbus's most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. It demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them simply to be.

"Diane Arbus was no a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs each day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be, given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline. Her pictures are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed."--John Szarkowski, 1972, Director, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art "I have never seen pictured like them before, and I am sure I will never see their equal again. They are the product of something beyond the camera, the result of a long, complex and intensely human process. No one can go into the street tomorrow and take a Diane Arbus photograph. That would be merely adjusting a lens and pressing a button. What made her pictures great was everything that happened before she pressed the button."--Douglas Davis, Newsweek, 1984 "Diane Arbus is one of our legends, her monograph a pivotal classic that changed the direction of photography in America. She captures the complexity and the art in reality. The quality that defines her work and separates it from almost all other photography is her ability to empathize on a level far beyond language."--Nan Goldin, Bookforum, 1995

这是一部引人入胜的著作，是对隐藏在这些有关我们时代强有力的照片背后一位女性充满悲悯的描述。她始终不渝地用照片率真地表现那些几乎得不到社会承认的人们，以及那些被认为是“正常”的人，把他们在公众中的假面具上的裂痕勾画出来，这些照片在他们创作的当时就引起了人们的争论，直到今天仍旧议论纷纷。