Home > Author > David duChemin
1 " Knowing failure is part of our process, and leads to new ideas, stronger work, and more honest questions, liberates us to peer, a little less frightened, into the unknown. "
― David duChemin , A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created
2 " Ideas rarely come out whole. They change as they get brought to life. New constraints appear, new directions suggest themselves, and new influences come to bear. "
3 " It is the daily task of the creative to be curious and collect dots. The most creative people I know fill their brains, their idea factories, with as much raw material as they can. They have voracious appetites. "
4 " Arrogance and a teachable spirit are mutually exclusive. "
5 " Slow down, take time, allow yourself to be wildly diverted from your plan. People are the soul of the place; don't forget to meet them and enjoy their company as you explore a place. "
― David duChemin , Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
6 " Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy. "
7 " Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past. "
8 " The real failure is to rob this world of the contribution only you can make, and to fail to make work that truly gives you that 'this is what I was created to do' feeling that has no equal. "
9 " You are responsible for every element within the frame. "
10 " As long as we’re alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we’ll have something to say. "
11 " A photograph can communicate a couple things— and sometimes only one thing—very well. The more you try to say with your photograph, the greater the chance that you will say nothing at all. "
12 " The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it. "
13 " A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it. "
14 " It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you gotengaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, “She looks like this.” The other says, “This is who she is to me. It’s how I feel about her. See how amazing she is? "
15 " It was suggested to me once that it’s called art-work, not art-fucking-around. "
― David duChemin
16 " Consider this your permission to indulge that inner anarchist. Stop following the path you ought to take; follow instead the one you long to take. "
― David duChemin , Visionmongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography
17 " You yourself are unique--you have ways of seeing your world that are unlike those of anyone else--so find ways to more faithfully express that, and your style will emerge. "
― David duChemin , Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
18 " The story is told of Michelangelo being asked about his methods for sculpting.He replied simply that he worked on a block of marble, removing all that was notpart of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifiesthe art of sculpture, but it’s an excellent analogy for photography, which isessentially an art of exclusion. "
19 " Photographers, like few other kinds of artists I can imagine, have an insanelypersonal relationship with their gear. "
20 " Vision is that original spark that was ignited within you and made you pick up a camera to capture whatever it is you saw, that made you turn to shout "Did you see that!" only to find no one there--so you created an image to do the telling. "
