But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art –it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives...

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If...

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed....

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages,...

If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental...

I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we...

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”[Speech upon...

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease....

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Twentieth century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Rüyaların yasaklanmamasına hayret ediyorum. Rüya ne büyük bir vaat! Ne büyük zevk! Ne kadar özel! Hem insana bir eş de gerekmez; kadın veya erkek, kimsenin işbirliğine gerek yok. Rüyalar, ruhun tamama ermemiş cinsel eylemidir.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Most of Arbus’s work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn’t have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol’s narcissism...

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has...

Sanity is a cozy lie.

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century...

I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don’t give a damn for anyone’s aggregation of facts,...

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art...

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet...

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the...

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim.