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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 thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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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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Take pictures of what you fear.
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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.
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The camera is a kind of license.
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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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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.
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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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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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These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
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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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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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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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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 would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
Diane Arbus
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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
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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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