Quote

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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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
Avoid
Identity
Left
Away
Else
Everything
Take

More quotes by Diane Arbus

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The camera is a kind of license.
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
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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.
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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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
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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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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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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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.
Diane Arbus
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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.
Diane Arbus
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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
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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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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
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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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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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
Diane Arbus
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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
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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 world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Diane Arbus