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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
Photography
Aristocrats
Already
Traumatic
Born
Freaks
Experience
Trauma
Life
Freak
People
Passed
Test
Tests
Dreading

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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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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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There's a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you've got some edge. You're carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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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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I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
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I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
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I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I've barely heard of them.
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Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
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I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.
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There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
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Take pictures of what you fear.
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The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
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One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
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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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I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
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