Filmmaker Statement

Diane Arbus photographs are frequently referenced at The Hollywood Reporter, where I used to work as a producer. When the magazine did a story about the history of dwarfism in Hollywood, I learned that the actors who played munchkins in THE WIZARD OF OZ were paid less than Toto and collectively credited with a word now considered a slur. Some of Arbus’s most famous photographs are of people with dwarfism -- where did her voyeurism end and their sense of agency begin? Why – and how? – do we comfortably observe otherness if it’s presented as fine art? Is there an implied complicity in being an audience? When Arbus, OZ, or THR creates an image of people deemed “other,” what is it we are really trying to see?