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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.

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
Inventions
Invention
Photographer
Ones
Beautiful
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
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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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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The camera is a kind of license.
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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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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The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
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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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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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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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus
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Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
Diane Arbus
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Take pictures of what you fear.
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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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 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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I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
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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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