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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

Diane Arbus

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Diane Arbus
Age: 48 †
Born: 1923
Born: March 14
Died: 1971
Died: July 26
Fashion Photographer
Photographer
New York City
New York
Diane Nemerov
Diane Nemerov Arbus
Diane née Nemerov
Diane nee Nemerov
People
Passed
Test
Tests
Dreading
Photography
Aristocrats
Already
Traumatic
Born
Freaks
Experience
Trauma
Life
Freak

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We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
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Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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Take pictures of what you fear.
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It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.
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I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
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For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
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The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
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It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.
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These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
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I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
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One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
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We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?
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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
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Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.
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...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
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The camera is a kind of license.
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