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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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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
Done
Important
Something
Hadn
Way
Pictures
Make
Recognize
Never
Ones
Seen
Take

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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.
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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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Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.
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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.
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
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The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
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Take pictures of what you fear.
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.
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I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
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I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
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The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
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The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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