Eve Arnold Quotes

I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

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

Literally, FX is like, 'How can we foster your vision?' My vision is pretty much taking pictures of the way I see my life.

I'm interested in the person I photograph. The world is so beautiful as it is; there's so much going on, which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me.

I'm just like a photographer or a director. Of course I have an opinion, but I don't think my opinion, or what I want to say... is so obvious 'cause that's not my job. My job is just to give a point of view, not more than that.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art.

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

Imitation always stinks. When I take photos, I don't go back. I don't look at the past. I'm always original.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.