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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.

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
Thought
Firsts
Perverse
First
Naughty
Thing
Photographer
Always
Favorite
Things
Photograph
Photography
Felt

More quotes by Diane Arbus

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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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Take pictures of what you fear.
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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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Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
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If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
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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.
Diane Arbus
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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
Diane Arbus
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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.
Diane Arbus
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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
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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.
Diane Arbus
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One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
Diane Arbus
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The camera is a kind of license.
Diane Arbus
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
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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.
Diane Arbus
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The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
Diane Arbus
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The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Diane Arbus
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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
Diane Arbus