Eve Arnold

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

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 you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

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.

You should never reveal your true age.

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

I can't hold a camera anymore.

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

What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that.

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

I look for a sense of reality with everything I did. I didn't work in a studio, I didn't light anything. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn't have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me and £5 worth of film in my pocket or maybe it was only £2 in those days.

I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

I love the idea I can go off with a single camera and a few rolls of film unencumbered... I was not interested in the illusion of reality, I wanted to get close to what was happening.

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.

I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.

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

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

I came to photography by accident.

I had in mind a long career.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given.

If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

If the chemistry is right between star and photographer and the geometry of the pictures pleases the star, often the two people end up with a long-term professional friendship during which they continue to work together and to produce highly personal images.