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 Quotes

I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of.

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

The camera is a kind of license.

— 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

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

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

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

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises.

— Diane Arbus

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

— 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

Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience.

— 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.

— Diane Arbus

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

— Diane Arbus

When you’re growing 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

If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

— Diane Arbus

Every Difference is a Likeness too.

— 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

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
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