Amy Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1954, New York, lives in New York.]
My mother’s work has been an enormous influence on me, but not literally. By that I mean, my photographs don’t look like hers. That makes it difficult to compare them. What they do share is an emotional intensity.
When I ask to photograph someone... what I’m saying is, I want to take you home with me and look at you for the rest of my life.
It’s entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?