Arbus Quotes

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

You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. ~ Diane Arbus

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

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. ~ Diane Arbus

What moves me about ... what's called technique ... is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them. ~ Diane Arbus

We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away. ~ Diane Arbus

For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else's skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed. ~ Rineke Dijkstra

If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy. ~ Diane Arbus

I dream
for an absentee and oft maligned
device - the accident-maker,
the soul-taker, my camera;
its factory guaranteed
third eye, without which I am duly dim
and memory denied. No pictures
for my contrived Arbus to declare,
excepting some stitch of Sexton
manages these sentences
of despair. ~ Kristen Henderson

The camera is a kind of license. ~ Diane Arbus

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus. ~ Robert Gober

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake. ~ Diane Arbus

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. ~ Diane Arbus

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

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud. ~ Diane Arbus

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining. ~ Diane Arbus

She lives always dressed as a woman and she whores as a woman. I would never think she was a man. I can't really see the man in her. Most of the time I absolutely know but she has none of the qualities of female impersonators that I can recognize. have gone into restaurants with her and every man in the place has turned around to look at her and made all kinds of hoots and whistles. And it was her, it wasn't me. ~ Diane Arbus

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

Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

Maxwell Arbus was the reason Saul lost an eye?"
"Yes," Millie answers stiffly. "But that was a long time ago. Saul has moved on. So have I."
Whatever checks I'd held on my emotions shatter.
"Moved on?!" Whirling around, I storm at Millie, waving my arms like a maniacal marionette. "I don't care if it was so long ago we could only get with a TARDIS! There is no moving on because it's happening right now! ~ Andrea Cremer

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories ~ Diane Arbus

I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of. ~ Diane Arbus

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

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility. ~ Diane Arbus

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. ~ Diane Arbus

The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it's true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You've just got to choose a subject - and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough. ~ Diane Arbus

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

I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't. ~ Diane Arbus

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding ~ Diane Arbus

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse. ~ Diane Arbus

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything. ~ Diane Arbus

[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect ~ Diane Arbus

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be. ~ Diane Arbus

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes. ~ Diane Arbus

I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed. ~ Diane Arbus

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies. ~ Diane Arbus

I'm fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it. ~ Raf Simons

Take pictures of what you fear. ~ Diane Arbus

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it. ~ Diane Arbus

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is ~ Susan Sontag

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

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

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

what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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