Eve Arnold Quotes

#1. I think if I ever get satisfied, I'll have to stop. It's the frustration that drives you.

Eve Arnold

#2. What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

Eve Arnold

#3. Themes recur again and again in my work.

Eve Arnold

#4. What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be 'curiosity.'

Eve Arnold

#5. I had in mind a long career.

Eve Arnold

#6. I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.

Eve Arnold

#7. I want the subject to be in control. Because they will give me something I couldn't possibly know about them.

Eve Arnold

#8. You should never reveal your true age.

Eve Arnold

#9. I can't hold a camera anymore.

Eve Arnold

#10. I love the idea I can go off with a single camera and a few rolls of film unencumbered ... I was not interested in the illusion of reality, I wanted to get close to what was happening.

Eve Arnold

#11. Being a woman is just a marvelous plus in photographing. Men like to be photographed by women, it becomes flirtatious and fun, and women feel less as if they're expected to be in a relationship.

Eve Arnold

#12. Lesson number one: Pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.

Eve Arnold

#13. If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

Eve Arnold

#14. It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

Eve Arnold

#15. If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.

Eve Arnold

#16. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

Eve Arnold

#17. I didn't want to be a woman photographer. That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with all the world open to my camera.

Eve Arnold

#18. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn't have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me.

Eve Arnold

#19. What do you hang on the walls of your mind?

Eve Arnold

#20. I never knew anyone who came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was
special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have - unconsciously - judged
other subjects.

Eve Arnold

#21. If you think of modern art like sex in all its forms - heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, multipartnered, bestial, whatever, with absolutely no holds barred and with everything available and permissible - that would be modern art.

Eve Arnold

#22. A studio session ... provides the greatest chance for control. Even though there is total freedom, I still dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre.

Eve Arnold

#23. I came to photography by accident.

Eve Arnold

#24. I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

Eve Arnold

#25. If the chemistry is right between star and photographer and the geometry of the pictures pleases the star, often the two people end up with a long-term professional friendship during which they continue to work together and to produce highly personal images.

Eve Arnold

#26. You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there.

Eve Arnold

#27. I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

Eve Arnold

#28. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Eve Arnold

#29. If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given.

Eve Arnold

#30. I find going back through things sometimes exhilarating because I find things I didn't know I had, and sometimes it's very off putting because there are things I never quite finished, and there's nothing at all to do about it now.

Eve Arnold

#31. What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that.

Eve Arnold

#32. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing ... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

Eve Arnold

#33. It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

Eve Arnold