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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

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
Street
Streets
Reality
Someone
Flaw
Flaws
Essentially
Notice
Appearance

More quotes by Diane Arbus

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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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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
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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
Diane Arbus
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Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.
Diane Arbus
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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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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
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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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The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
Diane Arbus
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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus
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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?
Diane Arbus
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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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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
Diane Arbus
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The camera is a kind of license.
Diane Arbus
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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 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
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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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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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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
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These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
Diane Arbus
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
Diane Arbus