Critical Reception

Aperture
Photographers on Photographers
Issue #151

"Everybody has a life. Everybody has a sensibility. Everybody has yearnings. Everybody has a cause to plead. And everybody has a camera. It takes an intelligence bold as Amy Arbus to turn these universal commonplaces not just into works of art, but works of insight."
—Richard Avedon

The New Yorker
Critic’s Notebook, Show People
May 19, 2008

"Arbus captures a moment of being someone else. In one exceptionally powerful portrait, we see the great artist Isabel Keating impersonating another great artist, Judy Garland, in 'The Boy from Oz' (2004)….You can tell that Keating would never give herself up, not entirely, to a photographer, unless she could be someone other than herself. You get the picture."
—Hilton Als on The Fourth Wall

Provincetown Arts Magazine
An Amy Arbus Affair
July 2012

"Superbly photographic representations of paintings, many of them portraits and all of them classics, that burst with clean, crisp lines and smoky shadows juxtaposed with bright, vivid colors; in essence, a daring, wholly original series of photographs that evoke, with style and originality, the paintings on which they’re based."
—Matthew B. Biedlingmaier on After Images

Provincetown Banner
Recasting the Masters
June 28, 2012

"What Arbus and her team have accomplished in 'After Images' is a leap to a new genre, combining techniques of painted portraiture with her own haunting interpretations of characters transformed from those encountered in familiar paintings; literally dark, hypnotic, painterly 'after-images,' they linger in memory as singular originals, each with its own unique signature."
—Susan Rand Brown

Professional Photographer
Insight: Amy Arbus on the path to enlightenment through photography
October 2007

"Personal examination is the core of Arbus’ approach to portraiture."
—Jeff Kent