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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
Always
Favorite
Things
Photograph
Photography
Felt
Thought
Firsts
Perverse
First
Naughty
Thing
Photographer
More quotes by Diane Arbus
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.
Diane Arbus
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.
Diane Arbus
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.
Diane Arbus
One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
Diane Arbus
These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
Diane Arbus
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Diane Arbus
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus
The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
Diane Arbus
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
Diane Arbus
The camera is a kind of license.
Diane Arbus
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.
Diane Arbus
I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
Diane Arbus
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
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
Diane Arbus
There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.
Diane Arbus
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
...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
I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus