Diane Arbus Photography Quotations

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.