Quotes by
Eve Arnold

You can’t make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn’t there.

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

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

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.

My passport was my camera.

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.

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

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.

It doesn’t matter if you use a box camera or a Leica, the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing. To have them realize without saying so, that it was up to them to give me whatever they wanted to give me… if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

It’s an aggressive way of working because you want to go as deeply as you can, if you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves.

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

Lesson number one, pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.

Themes recur again and again in my work. 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.