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Culture September 11, 2017
"Take pictures of what you fear."
Diane Arbus wasn’t your average photographer. She found beauty in what was traditionally viewed as ugly. She photographed marginalized communities such as dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists and circus performers.
Arbus attempted to capture “the space between who someone is and who they think they are.” She became famous for her photography in the last nine years of her life. Arbus challenged conventional ideas of art and became labeled as a “photographer of freaks” or, reversely, a “great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of what has become recognized as a new kind of photographic art.”
Her lessons and ideas about photography made others see life through Arbus’ eyes. But her quotes about photography are so profound that they can be applied to everyday life.
So, ENTITY compiled a list of the most famous Diane Arbus quotes that can be used in any situation.
“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”
“Take pictures of what you fear.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 saw the world differently than the rest of the world at the time. While some thought she was insane, others thought of her as an artistic genius. But her quotes remind us to take a step back and think outside of the box and against what is traditional and conventional.
