I was listening to this podcast where David duChemin talks about his fall in Pisa and how he’s recovering from it today. duChemin is a photographer very far away from my core competency, which is what first attracted me to him and his work; before his accident he’d made a decision to make changes in his life and was spending the year touring the U.S. — part vacation, part sabattical, part, it seems, mid-life crisis and reinventing himself. That’s something I can sympathize with since I’ve gone through a similar process since leaving Apple, and that he was willing to do so openly and in public made his story fascinating to me and something I’ve really wanted to support.
As a photographer, he’s best known as what I’d call a humanitarian photographer, traveling to various locations and shooting the people and places in ways that help illuminate those people; many of his clients are the non-govermental agencies (NGOs) that work to improve lives around the world. He’s also a strong travel photographer that brings a real humanity to his images. He’s also a board member of Focus for Humanity, a non-profit foundation aimed at supporting and mentoring photographers who are trying to tell those humanitarian and cultural stories around the world.
Given how rarely a human being appears in any of my photos, my being interested in his work may seem a bit odd, but he’s one of the photographers I’m studying because I know I need to improve this aspect of my work, and his technical and esthetic craft appeals to me as a style I want to adopt into my own photography.
He is the author of a couple of books published by Peachpit press, including Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
He’s also behind the e-book publishing imprint Craft and Vision, where he’s been experimenting with this new form publishing by reinventing the photography book. As I’ve written in the past, this is an area I’ve really been looking at as well for future projects, and frankly, I think his publishing model is the one I like best to date and would try to emulate if I ever decide to go down this path. The basic model is that instead of the traditional printed photography book — $30 or more, a few hundred pages and a huge effort to write and get published, the books from Craft and Vision are shorter (around 25-30 pages typically), more focused, can be written more quickly — and only cost $5.00. I’ve written about a few of these books in the past (Michael Frye’s Light and Land, for instance) and I’ve found them to be consistently high quality and well written, and at five bucks a shot, you can make them an impulse buy and not feel guilty.
If you want to explore duChemin’s work or this new ebook form of publishing, here are a few C&V works I can recommend: Ten Ways to Improve your Craft. None of them Involve buying Gear (and Ten More). Chasing the Look (ten ways to improve the Aesthetics of your Photographs) and Drawing the Eye (Creating Stronger Images through Visual Mass). The latter two would make a great introduction to this format and to duChemin’s work and philosophy of photography and I recommend them quite highly.
If you haven’t discovered duChemin, you should, through his blog, his online portfolio, and his books. He’s an interesting writer and inspired photographer and his way of communicating his vision has helped me shape and refine mine.
(and in a total coincidence, between my writing this and posting it, David’s announced his next C&V ebook, Deeper. Looking forward to getting my hands on it)
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