David duChemin > Quotes

“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.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“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.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“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

“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

“Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“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 not
part of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifies
the art of sculpture, but it’s an excellent analogy for photography, which is
essentially an art of exclusion.”
― David duChemin

“Photographers, like few other kinds of artists I can imagine, have an insanely
personal relationship with their gear.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“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.”
― David duChemin, Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

“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

“You are responsible for every element within the frame.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“Take a moment. What was it you saw when you were moved to pick up the camera? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you mutter something about thinking "it looked cool." Dig deeper. Was it a thought, a feeling, a simple moment when your eyes did a double-take at the intersection of two lines? Was it a lick of light, two blocks of color?”
― David duChemin, Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

“It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got

engaged. 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?”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“On the odd days Auto Tone gets it right I assume it's using some kind of voodoo.”
― David duChemin, Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

“The magic rarely happens within our comfort zone, but outside it, on the ragged, scary edge, where we have to fight like hell to keep from drowning in the unknown.”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“Courage is not an absence of fear, but an act of the will to move forward in the presence of fear. Fear whispers, “You might…” Courage rebuffs it with, “Sure, but….” To seek a fearless life is not the same as seeking a life of courage. If we’re talking about story, which is about nothing if not life, no one gives a damn about fearlessness. Very few great stories move forward with a fearless hero. Why would they?”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy: When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“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.”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“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.”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“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.”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“Talent is overrated and most often just the result of hard work; you just don’t see the effort, only the results. Results always look easy.  Make your art anyway.”
― David duChemin, The Problem With Muses: Notes on Everyday Creativity

“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.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“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

“As long as we’re alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we’ll have something to say.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“The perfect moment is one of our treasures, and patience is the best way to find it.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“Worrying we might fail leads to fear and paralysis; it leads to making “safe” decisions instead of the ones demanded by our art, our longings. 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. I”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy: When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“the appetites of our culture have outgrown what we’re able to swallow, yet alone afford.”
― David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy: When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created

“It was suggested to me once that it’s called art-work, not art-fucking-around.”
― David duChemin

“If the task of the artist is to know ourselves, the task of the technician—the craftsman—is to know our tools. When the two meet, magic happens.”
― David duChemin, The Soul of the Camera: The Photographer's Place in Picture-Making

“That's photography: the discipline of cramming your vision into a frame and making it fit.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“Professionals are not marked by how much money they make at their craft, but by their dedication to it and the way they recover and learn from the ones that got away.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision