I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the contrasting nature of success and failure, highlighting the wide spectrum of human experience.
Diane Arbus's quote emphasizes the complexity of human achievement by suggesting that the act of capturing the diverse spectrum of winners—from esteemed award recipients like Nobel laureates to those receiving humorous or derisive accolades—can reveal deep truths about society and the human condition. It points to the fragile nature of success while acknowledging the varied emotional states associated with winning, demonstrating that triumph is often intertwined with vulnerability and struggle.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech discussing the nature of success and its emotional implications.
More from Diane Arbus
All quotes →I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.
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 work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.
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Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture