An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus
"Absorbing analysis of [Arbus's] life... The book builds up to its final theory that Arbus's art served as an "accelerant" for her suicide. The dark nature of the work sucked her deeper into her personal abyss." --The Independent"Armed with interviews with her psychotherapist as well as autobiographical fragments, this new "psychobiography" sheds light on Arbus's opaque personality. Above all, [Schultz] shows how the photographer projected her inner torment and sense of estrangement onto her unsuspecting sitters." --The Economist"Schultz sifts and shapes his material with flair, working towards [Arbus's] death with all the planning of a good thriller. The temptation with any artist suicide, he warns us, is to find the "dark calculus" in their art. His triumph lies in making her suicide the one thing you don't see when you return to her images. -The Telegraph"Poignant and provocative, An Emergency in Slow Motion offers an entirely new way of relating to and understanding one of the most revered and influential postmodern photographers, in the process raising timeless and universal questions about otherness, the human condition, and the quest for making peace with the self." -Brain Pickings"Like her pictures, this dark inner life is not pretty... but it is discomfortingly enlightening." --Shelf Awareness“Exceptional prose, illuminating psychological theory, and the visceral memories of those who knew her add up to a haunting portrait of Arbus as a tenacious and quixotic artist whose outré photographs blaze on in all their strange romance, protest, and longing.” —Booklist "With extraordinary interviews with new sources, William Todd Schultz’sAn Emergency in Slow Motion...promises to be an explosive contribution to what’s known about Diane Arbus." -Daily Beast "A sensitive but deeply provocative psychobiography." - Vogue.com "Schultz is a sharp, lucid writer... He proceeds with a sense of reflection, perspective, and nuance." - NPR.org "Our Virgil on this journey into [Arbus's] inner world is William Todd Schultz... he marshals an impressive list of sources... [and] sifts and shapes his material with flair." -Telegraph(UK) "William Todd Schultz has done the impossible; he’s pulled Diane Arbus out from under the black shroud of the photographer’s cape and into the light.An Emergency in Slow Motionis the book Arbus’s legions of admirers have long waited for: a vivisection of her psyche that allows us—the voyeurs she made of us—to understand her stark, accusatory vision." —Kathryn Harrison, author ofThe Kiss “This portrait of the art and psyche of Diane Arbus is exciting and wrenching and full of revelations. And it is a model for the promise of William Todd Schultz's larger project to infuse psychobiography with curiosity, humility, and intelligence. Readers may be left, as I was, considering the eternal, essential, impossible problem: how to look at darkness. —Joshua Wolf Shenk, author ofLincoln's Melancholy “Schultz has written a short psychological symphony.  He begins with a few simple themes—about secrets and sex, about photographing freaks, about being a freak and photographing the self. Calling upon contemporary psychological research, extraordinary empathy, and a deep understanding of how madness and creativity often intersect, Schultz introduces surprising variations on these themes, as the music builds in complexity, texture, and beauty, pulling the reader forward, inexorably, to the dramatic conclusion"  —Dan P. McAdams, author ofGeorge W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream