She returned to Washington Square Park. The mystery of it appealed to
her tenacity. “There were days I just couldn’t work there,” she says
“and then there were days I could. And then, having done it a little, I
could do it more.” That’s the lesson artists should run with: do it a
little, do it more. Fail better and better. “I take rotten pictures,”
Arbus announces in the slideshow at one point. “I think that’s another
important secret. I used to think that you could just take the good
ones. You could just be terribly efficient, and you just wouldn’t play
unless you took the good ones. But it doesn’t really work that way. It’s
just the thing of doing it so goddamn much.”
- Hilton Als on Diane Arbus
descensus Averno facilis est