52 Quotes by Eve Arnold

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

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion.

Recording sessions were stimulating to photograph, because everything was in motion: the subject, the musicians, the technicians and the photographer. You needed fast reflexes to keep up with moving targets, and sensitivity and skill to get the pictures while keeping out of the performers' eyeline so as not to break their concentration.

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

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

Themes recur again and again in my work.

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

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.

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.