Diane Arbus Quotes

“I can’t defend this position, but I think I take photographs because there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“The camera is an instrument of detection…we photograph what we know and what we don’t know… when I point my camera at something I am asking a question and the photograph is sometimes an answer… In other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is getting the lesson.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn't; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy's red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn who called himself the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater or the black who carried a rose and noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who'd collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“As far as she was concerned, aristocracy had nothing to do with money or social position. Aristocracy was linked to a nobility of mind, a purity of spirit, as well as inexhaustible courage.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“Aristocracy was linked to a nobility of mind, a purity of spirit, as well as inexhaustible courage.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“Every form correctly seen is beautiful.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography