The most impact photography has ever had on me was when I was about 15 and went to the Los Angeles County Art Museum with my dad. We were visiting my great grandmother who lives nearby, and it is a tradition to always go to the museum while she takes a nap. There just happened to be a retrospective of Diane Arbus on display and we went to see it. I had never heard of Diane Arbus, but her work immediately impacted me. It was ugly and truthful and shocking but I instantly was drawn to it because she was photographing things that humans are universally so curious about. Not only the strange 'outsiders' type of photographs, like "Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents" (below), but photographs of how people relate to eachother (like the photo of a young couple, above). When we look at her photographs we get to have a slice of what it is like to be someone else. Her work is voyeuristic but not in an uninvited way, which I think separates her from other artists. After seeing the show I was left with an entirely new impression on what photography means as an artistic medium.
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