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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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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'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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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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Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
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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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...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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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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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.
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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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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 condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
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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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
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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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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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 a kind of license.
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.
Diane Arbus