Best 16 quotes of Arnold Newman on MyQuotes

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.

I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.

I don't care what you do with that negative, you can retouch it, you can spit on it, you can grind it underfoot. The only thing that matters is if it is honest. If [the picture] is honest, you and everybody can tell. If it is dishonest, you and everybody can tell.

Influences come from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime accumulation of influence: experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experiences come to a peak and you work on two levels: conscious and unconscious.

I often wonder whether I would have done as well in painting.

It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

We don't take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and our minds. They are a reflection of ourselves...wha t we are and what we think.

We don't take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds.