Diane Arbus Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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: Monograph

“what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
― Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.”
― Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Monograph