quotes

8/366

 

 

We are rarely given to know when our lives will change forever. In the years that follow, as we count the ripples, we can trace them to the single tiny stone – the brush of a hand, the sudden look, the conversation that took such a strange turn – the call in the dead of the night. Who we are – the kindness and the cruelty that shape us – may not come with a blush or a scar. We don’t hinge on universes. We hinge on little things.”

A-Force #2 Written by G Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett

I am woefully uneducated on comics and comic writers or artists, but someone on my Twitter timeline retweeted this quote from a comic last year, A-Force #2 and I’m absolutely sure it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. It is so true though, it really is the smallest things that become the most influential and affect the most change within us as people.

2/366

I don’t press the shutter. The image does

This is a quote by photographer Diane Arbus, an American photographer during the decades spanning the 40s to the 70s who was “noted for photographs of marginalised people—dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers—and others whose normality was perceived by the general populace as ugly or surreal.”

What struck me about this quote was that a lot of the time when I’m taking photos it feels like I’m not fully in control of what’s happening. Mechanically and technically I am making adjustments to settings etc, but the actual act of knowing when to take a shot often feels like it’s some esoteric process that doesn’t quite belong to me.

That’s why it’s so hard when someone asks questions about it; I’m not being deliberately obscure, it generally is something I know little about myself. I can recognize and anticipate when I think a moment will happen and I can frame a shot around that moment, but exactly the THE moment when my finger depresses the shutter I feel like I have very little control over. It just happens. That feeling of knowing exactly when is something that’s very hard to explain.

Below are a few of Diane’s works. She was a talented, extremely interesting person.

 

Photo by Diane Arbus

Photo by Diane Arbus

 

Photo by Diane Arbus

Photo by Diane Arbus

 

Photo by Diane Arbus

Photo by Diane Arbus