As a photographer, your eyes are your most important asset.  That may seem obvious, since photography is a visual medium, but often photographers and photographer wannabes get caught up in arguments about equipment, lighting, technique, etc., and forget that it is the eye of the person behind the lens that makes the most difference.

This idea was highlighted for me as I read the biography of Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth.  For those who do not know her work, Arbus was a photographer of tremendous talent and influence who chose to photograph the other world which exists and at the time was often unseen.  She was fascinated by prostitutes, pimps, gays, nudists, giants, people with deformities, dwarfs, freaks of nature, people today we would call mentally and physically challenged--populations then shunned by most of society.  She found them to be fascinating and ultimately more honest and true to life than most "normal" people. Even today, forty to fifty years after she worked, her images still have the power to shock and startle. She was criticized  by some contemporaries for working to strip all pretense from a person until their true self was revealed--not an easy task. Hers was a difficult life and she was not happy person.  Sadly, at the end of her life, she no longer found satisfaction or meaning in her work. By the time she died by suicide, she could barely pay her bills.  Now each of her original prints are worth thousands of dollars.

My point in bringing up Diane Arbus is that she had a particular vision, a special way of seeing. She felt it her calling, and I am paraphrasing here, to photograph the people and things no one else photographed because if she did not do so, no one else would. She had a strong art background and had worked for many years as a fashion photographer, so she knew how to take a photograph most people would consider beautiful. Yet she wanted to do more, to see something else. I think that whether you like her work or hate it, you must acknowledge her extraordinary ability to see things differently. It was her eye that made it possible for other photographers to expand their own artistic visions. This may be her most enduring legacy.