Quote

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

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
Dog
Photography
Lying
Thing
Never
Would
Mud
Photograph

More quotes by 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
These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
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
The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
Image
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
Image
The camera is a kind of license.
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
Image
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
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
I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
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
One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
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
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
Diane Arbus
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
Diane Arbus
Image
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus