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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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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
Recognize
Seen
Happiness
Ever
Nothing
Never

More quotes by 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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We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
Diane Arbus
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
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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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Take pictures of what you fear.
Diane Arbus
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The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
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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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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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
Diane Arbus
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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.
Diane Arbus
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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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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus
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For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
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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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 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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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
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The camera is a kind of license.
Diane Arbus
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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
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I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
Diane Arbus