Diane Arbus > Quotes

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.”
― Diane Arbus, Revelations

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
― diane arbus

“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

“My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.”
― Diane Arbus

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
― Diane Arbus

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”
― Diane Arbus

“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

“One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.”
― 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

“...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

“The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.”
― Diane Arbus

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

“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

“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.”
― Diane Arbus

“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.”
― Diane Arbus

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

“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
― 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

“... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.”
― Diane Arbus

“If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.”
― Diane Arbus

“If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”
― Diane Arbus

“Every Difference is a Likeness too.”
― 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. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you 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, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“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, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“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, Untitled

“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, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“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

“In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things. I'd be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots. Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you were dealing mostly in dark and light, not so much in flesh and blood.”
― Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
― Diane Arbus