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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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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
Heard
Known
Littles
Fascinate
Little
Photographing
Even
Barely
People
Drawn
Photographer
Subjects

More quotes by Diane Arbus

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We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
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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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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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One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
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If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
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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.
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Take pictures of what you fear.
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.
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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.
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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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The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
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For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
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