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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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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
License
Wherever
Photography
Wanted
More quotes by Diane Arbus
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.
Diane Arbus
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
Diane Arbus
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
The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
Diane Arbus
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
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
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Diane Arbus
If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
Diane Arbus
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
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
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
Diane Arbus
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
Diane Arbus
The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
Diane Arbus
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
I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
Diane Arbus
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
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
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
Diane Arbus
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus