Top 67 Arbus Quotes
#1. A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white - people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing.
William Eggleston
#2. In some ways Lawler is a conceptual Diane Arbus. She's a stalker who takes advantage of situations. She pulls back curtains, causing normal things to look freakish and the freakish to turn mundane.
Jerry Saltz
#3. In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?
Burton Silverman
#4. Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it.
Steven Shainberg
#5. Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
#6. I'm fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it.
Raf Simons
#7. Nudists are fond of saying that when you come right down to it everyone is alike, and, again, that when you come right down to it everyone is different.
Diane Arbus
#8. We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.
Diane Arbus
#9. It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, "All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up." And they did.
Diane Arbus
#10. What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's ... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.
Diane Arbus
#11. I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
#12. 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.
Diane Arbus
#13. And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.
Diane Arbus
#14. A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
#16. Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
Diane Arbus
#17. I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose.
Diane Arbus
#18. Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.
Diane Arbus
#19. Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus
#20. If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
Diane Arbus
#21. You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
Diane Arbus
#22. [Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect
Diane Arbus
#23. For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
Diane Arbus
#24. 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
#25. 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. 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
#26. These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.
Diane Arbus
#28. My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
Diane Arbus
#29. I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
Diane Arbus
#30. 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
#31. Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
Diane Arbus
#32. My mother's work has been an enormous influence on me, but not literally. By that I mean, my photographs don't look like hers. That makes it difficult to compare them. What they do share is an emotional intensity.
Amy Arbus
#33. One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.
Diane Arbus
#34. 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
#35. I mean, it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.
Diane Arbus
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
#41. I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
Diane Arbus
#42. The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.
Diane Arbus
#43. Richard Avedon taught me that if you go into a photo session and come out with what you had hoped for, it's a failure. You need to be surprised if you want it to be magical.
Amy Arbus
#44. The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories
Diane Arbus
#45. Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
Diane Arbus
#46. I think all families are creepy in a way.
Diane Arbus
#47. The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
Diane Arbus
#48. 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
#49. When you grow up your mother says, 'Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold.' When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.
Diane Arbus
#50. If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
Diane Arbus
#51. The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.
Diane Arbus
#52. 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
#53. I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
Diane Arbus
#54. When I ask to photograph someone, it is because I love the way they look and I think I make that clear. I'm paying them a tremendous compliment. What I'm saying is, I want to take you home with me and look at you for the rest of my life.
Amy Arbus
#56. 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
#57. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.
Diane Arbus
#58. what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.
Diane Arbus
#59. Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding
Diane Arbus
#60. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
Diane Arbus
#61. It's entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography ... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?
Amy Arbus
#62. Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.
Diane Arbus
#63. It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.
Diane Arbus
#64. 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.
Diane Arbus
#65. The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.
Diane Arbus
#66. Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises
Diane Arbus
#67. The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
Diane Arbus
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
