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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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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
Needs
Appearance
Thing
Everybody
Way
Looking
People
Another
Look
Come
Looks
Observe
Need
Photographer

More quotes by 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.
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Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
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Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.
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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
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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 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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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
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These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
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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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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 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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One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
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.
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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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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus