‘It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.’ –Diane Arbus

I recently finished Emergency in Slow Motion and have had a little time now to think it over.  I have been re-reading Patricia Bosworths biography on Arbus and looking at Arbus photographs through the psychological lens provided by Schultz insights. The above quote had always been one of those Arbus Koans that puzzled me but now I think I understand what she meant.  I think that like a lot of photographers she used the camera to take pictures in hopes that the camera might reveal something she would miss. We see the world in a dynamic continuium filtered by our beliefs.  We don't observe so much as project. The camera captures the world in static fractions of a second that we can than study and see what our eye cannot.  It reveals things to us that we have never been able to see but we know and recognize when we confront it.