Arnold Newman Quotes

I rarely know exactly what I want to do, but always know exactly how I want it to make me feel. Feeling always leads the sound!

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Sometimes, I knew generally what I was going to do, but I've never written anything down. Call it a sixth sense: the lines just come.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in,-when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.

The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express.

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.

I believe that... my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.

I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.

What reason would grope for in vain, spontaneous impulse ofttimes achieves at a stroke, with light and pleasureful guidance.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

Even though I teach with 35mm, my method takes people by surprise, because it isn't fast, and it isn't about hardware or software, or even great results. It's about great process.

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.

I get to the point where I feel relaxed, and then I just shoot a ton of material and make a lot of different choices.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.