Eve Arnold Quotes

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

As soon as I had the camera in my hand for the first time, I just fell in love.

You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I've always loved those portraits that Alfred Stieglitz did of Georgia O'Keeffe over several years, which really convey the idea that there's not one image that can capture a woman, because we're changing all the time.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.