Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a photographer. She was born in Philadelphia more than 70 years ago, the daughter of immigrant Russian Jews. Her passion for photography began in her teens with the present of a camera and has continued throughout her long and adventurous life. Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Paul Newman, and many other stars have fallen under the spell of her lens. She's also travelled the world in search of arresting pictures, living with hippie communes or the black power movement. Today she's regarded as one of the world's outstanding photojournalists, defining the secret of her skill as showing you something you wouldn't have seen if the photographer hadn't shown it to you. She is Eve Arnold. Can you flesh out that definition, Eve? Is the skill showing you something you couldn't see with the naked eye, or is it directing the eye towards something? No, it is a point of view.

Eve Arnold1:19

Snow

Presenter1:22

It's focusing in closely on something that appeals or repels, it's like writing a lead sentence.

Presenter1:30

It does that kind of thing. It says, stop here, look at this. And look at this. And it says, this is the way I see it.

Eve Arnold1:31

It's a

Eve Arnold1:33

And look at

Presenter1:37

But do you do you when you see something, do you see it with a photographer's eye? Do you well, of course you do, but do you suddenly look at it and think, I know how I could make that look through the lens? Well, what the photographer tries to do

Eve Arnold1:46

Uh

Speaker 41:46

Well

Presenter1:49

is to give meaning.

Presenter1:51

To whatever it is that he's seeing, and is trying to communicate that meaning beyond his own vision.

Presenter1:58

To the person who was viewing that picture. But obviously, you have different ways of doing that, and you have different styles of photography. I'm thinking, first of all, of a Sunday Times magazine cover of a violinist that you did for a music festival way back now, where the girl violinist is almost a well, she's a silhouette, almost a shadow, isn't she? And yet her instrument is terribly clear. Would you see the girl violinist and think, with a trick of light here, I can create this clever photograph? I did not introduce the light.

Eve Arnold2:27

I did not introduce

Presenter2:30

The light was there. Naturally different available light, we call it.

Eve Arnold2:31

Not so much.

Presenter2:34

That is the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist. In the very beginning I learned how to light in a studio and then gave all that up because film is very fast. Light is there for you. If you want the reality and not imposing your own ideas, then you use the light that is out there. But then there are other pictures that you've done and one of the most memorable I think is Marilyn Munro in the Lady's Loo, looking at her hair in the mirror, and you're behind her. The camera's behind her, as it were, and her skirt is hitched up, and you can just see the back of her knickers. I mean, that presumably was not something you thought about, or you suddenly took it on the hoof.

Eve Arnold3:13

Die who

Presenter3:14

You're there to observe and your reflexes have to be very, very fast, and then when you see something, then it catches you and you catch it.

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But then

Presenter3:25

Another style again, I'm thinking of a photograph you took of Alec Douglas Hume when he was Prime Minister at home.

Presenter3:33

in Scotland, sitting in his chair, his wife is standing at the fireplace. They look as if there's nobody else in the room, let alone a camera. Now how do you achieve that? When I went to Scotland a photograph,

Presenter3:46

Alec Douglas Hume, who was then Prime Minister.

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He was wonderful. When the car stopped outside this great house of his, he came out and carried my camera bag in. So instantly there was a kind of rapport between us. And it obtained for the rest of the day. When I worked with him and with his wife, I had lunch with him. I was invited in to see the house and to move about and to pick whatever location I wanted. And that picture was at the end of the day. I think they were tired. I think they'd had enough of me. And they were just in my hands.

Presenter4:20

Tell me about your first record.

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My first record is Marilyn Monroe.

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Diamond's her girl's best friend. I had gotten to know her and photographed her over a ten years' scratch.

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And she was quite extraordinary, and this song reminds me of her.

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And I think music is very much about memory for me.

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And nature bestows that great gift of memory when you age. And so many of my records that I've chosen are about what these things meant to me in very personal terms.

Speaker 44:55

A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend.

Speaker 45:06

A kiss may be grand.

Speaker 45:09

But it won't pay the rental on your humble flat Or help you at the auto map Mail grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our charms in the end

Presenter5:26

Marilyn Monroe and Diamonds are a girl's best friend. As you say, Eve Arnold, you worked with her, knew her, on and off over a period of ten years until the year before she died in'sixty two.

Presenter5:36

How special was she in your view? Do you think she deserved to be the legend she now is?

Presenter5:43

I think she was extraordinary. She had created that figure out of whole cloth, and so she was an original.

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She embodied so much vulnerability, so much weakness, so much strength. And she seemed a symbol for so much of what was going on in the 50s and 60s that still obtains and carries forward. But was she physically confident? I mean, we know she obviously wasn't emotionally, but in front of the camera and so on, she loved it. She knit loved it. She adored the steel camera.

Eve Arnold6:14

Please

Presenter6:18

more than the motion picture camera, because with a still camera she was in charge. She could be late and it didn't matter. There wasn't a crew waiting for her. Didn't have to learn any lines.

Presenter6:30

She photographed ten pounds lighter, which was surprising. That's unusual, isn't it? It's most unusual. Most people photograph ten pounds heavier. The other thing that she had that

Eve Arnold6:33

That's on

Eve Arnold6:34

Okay.

Presenter6:39

Nobody's ever remarked on that, I I don't know why. She had sort of a film of hair.

Presenter6:47

The light would glow on her face. A sort of down. A down, yes. Sort of like a baby's down when a child is born. You get that very soft look on a child's face. That's what she maintained. The sort of trick people try to achieve with Vaseline around the lens. It is a sort of a tremendous. Right, softness. The glow. The glow.

Eve Arnold6:59

Yeah.

Speaker 27:03

Right, softness.

Speaker 47:05

Hello, Mikla.

Speaker 27:06

Yeah.

Presenter7:06

But she could just switch it on, couldn't she? Absolutely. She would say to me, Let's make a Marilyn. We'd walk down the street and she would look a mess. Hair wasn't combed. She had on a sloppy sweater.

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And suddenly it would she would sort of rise up. She was small, she was about five feet four.

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and she would become Marilyn Monroe.

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And you would get into a cab with her, and the cab driver would say, Lady

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If you combed your hair, put on a little makeup, changed your clothes, you'd look like Marilyn Monroe, and she'd love.

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And then she'd speak and they knew it was her. Yes. The speech was interesting because she had stuttered as a child, and so that breathless quality was trying to get control of the voice.

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Did you sense, though, her her her deep unhappiness? And did you have any hint?

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In a a little bit I remember when I came out for the last film for The Misfits, and I had not seen her in about four years.

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She said to me, How do I look?

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And I said, You look wonderful and she did.

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And she said, Oh, I don't know. She said, I'm thirty four years old.

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I'm tired. I've been dancing for six months on a film called Let's Make Love. And she said, Where do I go from here?

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And it was really very touching. She was not talking to me, she was talking to herself about

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What a trying time she was having her marriage to Miller had just broken up.

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She was desperately sad.

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Record number two.

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My choice of Paul Robeson singing Schlofmein Kind is very important to me because he sings a lullaby in Yiddish. My mother used to sing it in Russian, and it's called Sleep My Child.

Presenter8:44

And it's a very tender lullaby, and my mother sang it to me as a child.

Speaker 48:49

Dove mind key

Speaker 48:54

Shlofk

Speaker 49:00

Sing the deer.

Speaker 49:07

Us do mine key into best out of it

Presenter9:20

Paul Robeson and Schloff Meinkind.

Presenter9:23

Your photography is self-taught, isn't it, Eve? You've never really had any professional training. Oh, I had six weeks of training at the New School for Social Research under Grodovich, who was the great hero of magazine art direction. This was in New York. In New York. Just six weeks. Six weeks. It was given to the school called New School for Social Research. How did you get on?

Presenter9:46

Well, the first day that I went to the class I brought some pictures with me.

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Rodovitch had told the class that we were all going to criticize each other's work.

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And the class was just savage with me. My work was not very good. It was.

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Very much camera club kind of thing.

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And I left that class determined that I would never go back.

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However, I was too intrigued with what the assignment that was given us was, which was for the following week we were all to go out and photograph

Presenter10:20

Fashion shop, and I wasn't interested in fashion, but I dug up.

Presenter10:25

a group of fashion models in Harlem. And it was really quite incredible because this was in the fifties when you couldn't place a magazine article in a white magazine about a plaque.

Presenter10:39

But I was intrigued with these young women. It was before the civil rights movement became very heavy in the States. And these women in Harlem were sewing their own clothes, designing them. It was at once an attempt to go their own way and also an attempt to turn their backs on Seventh Avenue and the rag trade in New York.

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And I photographed there, came back with the pictures to the class.

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Of one of the models called Fabulous. Her name was Charlotte Scribling, but she called herself Fabulous.

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and Brodovich, who was giving the class,

Presenter11:16

decided that these were fine pictures and I was to go back.

Presenter11:21

and continued photographing and I went back for over a year. But what what was so extraordinary about it?

Presenter11:26

Well, these were the days when people worked mainly in studios and everything was beautifully lit and retouched and organized. And these were simply documentation and recordings of what was going on. It was kind of reportage. A reportage with no no additional light.

Presenter11:44

Everything as was. And the models moving, not posed. No, no, the models moving and, you know, preparing and putting on their makeup and their wigs and doing whatever they were doing. But was it so very different in terms of the image? I mean, I've seen the pictures you're talking about and Fabulous was kind of sacheting towards you, wasn't she, with these wonderful clothes on. Well, she was in motion. Yeah.

Eve Arnold12:06

Yeah.

Presenter12:08

And that was not what happened. You would always say, hold it.

Presenter12:12

If you run a studio and photographing a model, it was always posy, it was always contrived.

Presenter12:19

Uh whereas this was natural. And because I didn't know it shouldn't be done that way, I did it my way. So it was available light. It was wa y you were off the tripod, it was hand held, wasn't it?

Eve Arnold12:29

Canned.

Presenter12:29

Which was incredibly avant-garde, really, wasn't it?

Presenter12:34

And gone into the visual language, that kind of thing. But those pictures, I think, m made their found their way to picture posts, didn't they? You've got a I think it's an eight-page spread and a cover. And as a sort of practically an amateur, you must have been thrilled a bit. I was delighted.

Eve Arnold12:41

You could

Eve Arnold12:44

I'm a curve.

Eve Arnold12:45

And

Presenter12:50

Of course. How did it happen? How did they get there? My ex-husband had gone to school in Britain.

Presenter12:57

And he knew of picture post and he knew that I would be heartbroken because no American magazine would publish those pictures and he sent them off. They wouldn't publish them because the models were black. Because the models were black and because they were so different from everything else that was happening. They would be considered, you know, what is this? Why are we doing this? When we can light her up, why are we doing it this way?

Presenter13:17

So Picture Post grabbed them. And not only that, they were then syndicated across Europe, weren't they?

Presenter13:25

and said they belonged to her and she syndicated them without telling me. So you you didn't make too much money out of it?

Presenter13:32

But they were sold across the world, and you were, I think, as a result of that, invited to become the first American woman member of Magnum, the elite international cooperative of photographers, which I want to ask you about in a moment. But let's pause there for record number three.

Presenter13:47

In my desert island discs I wanted very badly to have the magic flute. The voice of the flute is very beautiful.

Presenter14:53

Part of the overture to Mozart's magic flute played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter14:59

By the way, Eve, who was it who gave you that first camera when you were seventeen or eighteen, I think you were given it? It was a boyfriend who was a camera club nut. He gave me my first camera and

Presenter15:11

I was going to school at night.

Presenter15:13

And weekends we would get together, he and I, and we would photograph things we'd seen in the camera magazines. What kind of camera was it, do you remember? It was a radio cord and it cost $40. It took 12 images. So it was quite a generous present. Oh, in those days, yes. Absolutely. Because you were you had not been well off as a child, had you? You were one of nine children born before the Depression. So, I mean, being given a camera by a boyfriend was a major event, I would think. Yes, it was a great delight. And I felt very happy about it. I was going to be a doctor. That was my plan.

Presenter15:47

Uh and the moment I got the camera I was hooked.

Presenter15:50

So in nineteen fifty two, following the the success of those Harlem shots with the fashion shots we were talking about, you were invited to join Magnum, as I said. How how big was it then? Who ran it? What was it? It was a very lively group of nonconformists.

Presenter16:06

It had been founded by four.

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Men who had been in the Second World War, Robert Koppa.

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Who was a

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A journalist during the war worked for Life magazine.

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And there was cartier bresson.

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George Roger

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and David Seymour.

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And the contribution that Magnum has made, I think, to photography is the ownership.

Presenter16:31

The ownership of the copyright.

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Because therefore presumably

Presenter16:36

Even now, when Marilyn Monroe's pictures are are published or whoever else you've ever photographed, but it still gets paid, do you? Yes, of course.

Eve Arnold16:42

Yeah.

Presenter16:45

Can you tell me how that can be justified? Because after all, what's selling the picture really is the person in front of the lens, not the person behind it. It's the it's the image, the performer. Would it exist without the person behind the lens?

Eve Arnold16:53

But yes, the performer.

Presenter16:58

If you write about somebody, you own copyright. Why shouldn't the image have the same validity and same worth?

Presenter17:05

Has the word.

Presenter17:07

But it's difficult to believe that, for example, someone today like Madonna, shall we say, would would hand over that copyright. Surely these days the big city these days people like Madonna have the right to destroy a negative if they so choose.

Eve Arnold17:14

It's the big sea.

Presenter17:20

Some actors and personalities insist upon being paid in perpetuity for the use of their faces and their bodies. And I understand that. I'm sympathetic to it.

Presenter17:32

But going back to you and Magnum in 1952, that must have been an incredible experience because you were very inexperienced, really, when you were. You were a wife and a mother by that stage, so you're obviously quite driven to photography. But suddenly to be rubbing shoulders with these great names must have been an incredible experience. It was wonderful because we would show each other pictures, we would talk about the photographs, we would join together and go and look at exhibitions, we would do all of that.

Eve Arnold17:59

Joined to the

Presenter18:04

We don't do that very much now. What was the best piece of advice you were ever given by those people, those photographers?

Presenter18:11

I guess it was Kapa who then he said this to many people, but he also said it to me.

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If you're not good enough, it's because you're not close enough.

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The idea being that

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to get at the essence of it.

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You must get close, whether it's physically or emotionally. More music.

Presenter18:30

Oh, Bessie Smith. I grew up with jazz and I loved the Bessie Smith recordings. And one of my favorites was Alexander's Ragtime Band. And then it became alive for me when I started working in Harlem. And I went back many, many times through the 60s during the period when there was great civil strife in the States. And whenever I'm in New York, if I think it's safe.

Presenter18:59

I'd go to Harlem.

Speaker 219:01

Come on in lamb, come on along, come on along. Let me take you by the hand. Up to the man, up to the man who is the leader of the band. And at the killer, yeah, that's the morning river. Late in right time, come on in here.

Eve Arnold19:19

Can ride

Speaker 219:22

Come on in here, having damned rag time pain.

Presenter19:29

Bessie Smith and Alexander's Ragtime Band. You're still only one of four members of Magnum Ivanal, so you're a rare bird. Do you think, however, there are advantages to being a woman photographer?

Presenter19:42

You have enormous advantages. Women feel very good being photographed by other women.

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that men enjoy it.

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And I found it was one of the great pluses that women trust you. And specifically, of course, Joan Crawford trusted you, didn't she? She she swore, quote, love and eternal trust always and with good reason, I think.

Presenter20:03

Well, the story I did on Joan Crawford is an extraordinary one. We have pictures of her lying across a table with a mass house at the head, a mass house at the feet, a poodle in the crotch, uh the face strapped up in bandages because she's having a facial.

Presenter20:21

It was beyond what I would have asked for. But she wanted it. She wanted it. She wanted her public, as she said.

Eve Arnold20:23

She wanted it.

Presenter20:28

To know what it was like to hang on to that mountain

Presenter20:31

The mountain being Hollywood for thirty years. But there was one particular instance, wasn't there, when you saved Joan Crawford from herself.

Eve Arnold20:35

It's one

Presenter20:39

The first time I met her she was very anxious.

Presenter20:44

that I photograph her in the nude.

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We had gone to a dress designer.

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called Tina Lesser, and Joan was to try on some clothes with her daughter, Christina. Christina was not there when I arrived.

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Joan and I went into a dressing-room. She scripped, and she said, I'm ready.

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And something happens to Flesh after fifty.

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and I decided that it was not a good idea.

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She insisted. I said, Can't we wait for Christina? No, we can't wait. I'm ready.

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And so I picked up the camera. I was so nervous that I didn't realize that I had color in the camera. I'd never developed a roll of color in my life.

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And I didn't dare take it back.

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to a processor because I was afraid that he might then proceed to take a few prints off for himself and I couldn't let that happen.

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I kept saying no, no, no, but at any rate I did them and then I was like, yes, she drank all the time.

Eve Arnold21:40

But she gave them a bag.

Presenter21:44

So what happened to the negs?

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I gave them back to her.

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And that's when she said love and eternal trust always. But I do want to give the impression that your career was all Hollywood during those years, because far from it. Let me go to the other extreme. You photographed at one point Senator Joe McCarthy, didn't you, during his witch hunt for American communists? Presumably you didn't set out to protect him from himself. No, he was a hateful man and he held America to ransom. He was really a horror.

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He was a very wily man and very hard to dislike because he had a kind of oily charm.

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That he turned off.

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And when I came into the hearing room at the Senate,

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He stopped what he was doing, came down off the dais where he was holding forth, came to me to this one freelance photographer. He was so avid, he wanted every possible picture, every possible word about him. He came over to me to find out where I worked and for whom and what I wanted to do. And when I told him that I worked for fortune and for life, and by this time I was, he then let me do whatever I wanted. And he finished the hearing one morning and he came over to me and put his arm up on my shoulder.

Presenter23:03

And suddenly I realized this man that I thought was so loathsome was I he was there on with his hand on my shoulder. So I put my hand up to put his away.

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and I suddenly realized it wasn't a smart thing to do, so I wound up holding hands with him.

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And I turned around and looked at these thirty press people that were standing there staring at me.

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And it was just awful. So I simply said, Excuse me, Senator, I had to go to work. So he removed his hand. I went to work. When I went down into the Senate dining room, none of the men sitting at the tables, the press table, would talk to me.

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Quite frightening actually. It was terrifying.

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More music.

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Ah, the Monteverdi Vespers. This is for my son. Do you know I wanted to be a doctor before I became a photographer? My son is now a doctor.

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And one of the images I have of him is listening to the Monteverde Vespers.

Presenter24:58

The opening of Monteverdi's Vespers of sixteen ten, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the early music consort of London, conducted by Philip Ledger.

Presenter25:08

If you were afraid, Eve, um, when American newsmen ostracized you, you must have been terrified when Life magazine assigned you to Malcolm X., the black Muslim leader, for eighteen months. How how threatening an experience was that? It was scary because the women would glare at me at the various black Muslim meetings.

Presenter25:27

The head of the American Nazi party showed up with some Nazis because he and Malcolm were playing games together. The idea was that America would be split in two, that the the Muslims would get the eastern seaboard and everything in between, and the Nazis would get the west coast and everything going toward the middle.

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George Lincoln Rockwell, who was head of the American Nazi Party.

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said to me, I'm going to make a lamp shade out of you.

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And I said, As long as it's not a bar of soap and kept on shooting. That was frightening. And then at one point when I'd gotten to know Malcolm quite well, he took me to a an outdoor meeting in Harlem.

Presenter26:06

There was one crazed woman in particular who was running around yelling, Kill the white bitch, kill the white bitch But I kept on shooting, walked around the crowd.

Presenter26:16

And it was a summer's night, and I still remember I had on a linen dress and a woollen sweater.

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When I got back

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To the life office to have the film processed. I took my sweater off.

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and unzipped the pockets in which I had my film, looked at the back of the sweater, it was pocket dotted with cigarette burns, because wool doesn't

Presenter26:39

burn it smoulders and as I'd gone around the crowd they've been sticking lighted cigarettes into the back of me. But you've been moving so fast.

Eve Arnold26:45

Fingers still

Presenter26:48

It would be easy to conclude, therefore, that that Eve Arnold has been incredibly brave in her career. I wonder i if you feel that or whether you perhaps you don't even feel fear at the time because you're doing a job.

Presenter27:00

It never occurs to me to be afraid. And then I'm a case of delayed reaction. After it's over, I get the shakes.

Presenter27:07

But not not in the beginning.

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I think the thing that motivated me was curiosity, and even the fear was part of that curiosity, part of seeing how I would react.

Presenter27:18

To different stimuli. But the sacrifices are huge, aren't they? The sacrifices are. No, they're enormous. Well, family, certainly.

Eve Arnold27:22

Is all there

Eve Arnold27:23

There we go.

Presenter27:24

You're just not at home.

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You're not there.

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And that I think is the most

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Painful.

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I always cried when I got into a plane to go away.

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But it never cared me stay home.

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Record number six.

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Record number six is the Vivaldi flute concerto.

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particularly because it reminds me of something that happened.

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Early on I had a house in Long Island.

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And in the summers.

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We would sit out of doors, and there was a great trellis of roses, and we would play Vivaldi concerti, and birds, starlings would come and settle on the rose bush.

Presenter28:07

And then we tried

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Stopping that recording put some jazz on, the birds would fly away, we'd put the Vivaldi back, and the birds would come back.

Presenter29:14

Part of Vivaldi's flute concerto number one in D major, played by Gastoni Ticinare, with I muzzici Vettuozi di Milano.

Presenter29:23

You and your family moved to London in the early sixties when the Sunday Times colour magazine, Colour Supplement, had just started and you went to work on it with all those names, Snowden, Bailey, Donovan, McCullen. Can you recall the atmosphere of it? It must have been very exciting. It was an adventure playground. It was really quite wonderful. We had almost total control of what we wanted to be. You know, I would call up and say I thought it'd be nice to do something on veiled women.

Presenter29:52

And Michael Rand, who was the art director and quite wonderful, would then say, Where do you want to go?

Presenter29:59

And I would wind I wound up in that case in the Arab Emirates, in Egypt and Afghanistan. So you had a kind of editorial freedom of your own, right? There wasn't a picture editor sitting behind a desk in London telling you what your picture ought to be?

Presenter30:15

It was so open Sunday times applied for fifteen years for for a visa for me to go to China.

Presenter30:22

And because I was an American and the Americans were at odds with the Chinese, I couldn't get the visa. When it finally came through immediately after, diplomatic relations were resumed between America and

Presenter30:34

China

Presenter30:35

I called Michael Rand and said, Look, my visas come through.

Presenter30:40

And

Presenter30:41

He said, then we'd better have a Chinese lunch and talk about it. When I said to him over that Chinese lunch, How do you see this?

Presenter30:48

Any words of wisdom in a hurry? I said to him, and he said, um, well, if you're in Pekin, you might do a story on Pekin duck.

Presenter30:58

So basically it was down to you. Yes. But that's obviously what you've enjoyed flying by the seat of your pants, actually. You you haven't wanted a safe life, have you?

Eve Arnold30:59

Yes.

Presenter31:06

No, and I don't regret that I didn't have one, but I have often wondered what it would be like.

Presenter31:13

Record number seven.

Presenter31:15

Jimmie Hendricks and Little Wang.

Presenter31:18

This is for Michael, my grandson who's eighteen and who has lots of hair.

Presenter31:23

just like Jimi Hendrix, and who plays Little Wing a lot of the time.

Speaker 431:27

With a thousand smiles she destined

Speaker 431:35

It's all right, she said it's alright.

Speaker 431:39

Take anything you want from me Take that

Speaker 431:46

Danny Fae

Presenter31:56

Jimi Hendricks and Little Wing and memories of your grandson, whom you've taught photography. Can you do that? Is it possible to teach photography? No, you can teach them technique, but you can't teach them photography.

Presenter32:09

The thing is to

Presenter32:10

Learn enough technique, then forget about it and go out and do what you can. And then learn to see, presumably. As you say, if you walk around seeing things in a sidewalk,

Eve Arnold32:16

Exactly.

Eve Arnold32:19

Petli.

Speaker 432:20

Yeah.

Eve Arnold32:20

Yeah.

Presenter32:22

When you've looked long enough,

Presenter32:24

Then there is sight, there there is understanding.

Presenter32:28

And has your grandson taken one of those very rare pictures, that is, of you? Because you're like so many photographers, you don't like having your own photograph taken, do you?

Presenter32:37

No, I don't. I don't like the way I look on phot photographs. Do any of us?

Presenter32:42

But yes, we do. The thing that I have found that a photograph I took a photograph of you today, let's say a passport photograph, and you look at it and you take it out of the booth and you say, Oh my God. Five years later when you go back for the new one, you look at the old one and you say, Well, it's not so much

Presenter32:58

Your job's ev inevitably meant, as we've discussed, that that you've been a bit of a gypsy, so I presume that a a desert island will be just another place, maybe another job to you, would it?

Presenter33:08

Oh, no because I would be alone, which is nice. I enjoy solitude.

Presenter33:13

Time to think and reflect.

Presenter33:15

No, for a short time. I think I'd like that.

Presenter33:20

Last record.

Presenter33:22

The last record is one by John Williams, who's a good friend, and I would like friends around me on the island.

Presenter33:30

And he's a remarkable guitarist, so something I would like to hear again and again.

Presenter34:35

Part of the prelude to Bach's Lute Suite number four in E major, played by John Williams. So if you could only take one of those records, not all eight, Eve, which one would it be? I would think the Bivaldi.

Presenter34:48

See if the birds would come and sit along its ice.

Eve Arnold34:50

Ah Possibly.

Presenter34:51

What about your book?

Presenter34:53

I think this is an obvious one, a thousand and one nights.

Presenter34:58

Also because I've worked in the Middle East, because it's always interested me, because I've made a film about harems in Arabia.

Presenter35:07

and I thought every night I could turn it on we'd listen to one tale.

Presenter35:11

And I could go on for three years like that.

Presenter35:14

And what about your luxury?

Presenter35:15

Could I have a dark room with some film and camera?

Presenter35:19

I'm sure you could. Okay, then that's it. Yves, Arnold, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Eve Arnold35:34

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.