Quote

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

Diane Arbus

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Nothing
Never
Recognize
Seen
Happiness
Ever

More quotes by Diane Arbus

Image
Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe.
Diane Arbus
Image
Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
Diane Arbus
Image
...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
Image
You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus
Image
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
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.
Diane Arbus
Image
We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
Diane Arbus
Image
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
Image
The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
Diane Arbus
Image
I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
Diane Arbus
Image
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
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