Arbus Quotes & Sayings

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

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way. — Diane Arbus

Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises — Diane Arbus

It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction. — Diane Arbus

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been. — 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 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

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

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

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child. — Norman Mailer

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

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

Every Difference is a Likeness too. — Diane Arbus

Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do. — Diane Arbus

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

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. — Diane Arbus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility. — 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

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

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 didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy. — 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

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

The camera is a kind of license. — Diane Arbus

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

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

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed. — 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

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — 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

Take pictures of what you fear. — 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'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

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

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

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

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

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

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. — 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

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

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

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

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

I think all families are creepy in a way. — 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

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

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

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

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

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding — 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

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man's face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building - and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It's the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. — Duane Michals

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

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

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

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything. — 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

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

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

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery. — Diane Arbus

The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting. — Caleb Deschanel