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The camera is a kind of license.

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
Camera
Photographer
Cameras
Kind

More quotes by 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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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
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If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
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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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
Diane Arbus
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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
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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
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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
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
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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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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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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I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
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 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
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These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
Diane Arbus
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The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
Diane Arbus
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One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
Diane Arbus
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus