David DuChemin Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I dream big dreams every day; it's up to the universe to keep up.

David DuChemin

#5. Arrogance and a teachable spirit are mutually exclusive.

David DuChemin

#6. On the odd days Auto Tone gets it right I assume it's using some kind of voodoo.

David DuChemin

#7. 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

#8. You are responsible for every element within the frame.

David DuChemin

#9. The second way to control the light is with the aperture in the lens, which is a diaphragm that opens and closes to control the light. It's measured in cryptic little numbers that only mathematicians and practitioners of the occult understand.

David DuChemin

#10. 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

#11. Photographers, like few other kinds of artists I can imagine, have an insanely
personal relationship with their gear.

David DuChemin

#12. 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

#13. To do what we should in art is bondage. To tell others, with our art, what they should think or feel or do, is propaganda.

David DuChemin

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Bruce Percy, a brilliant landscape photographer, once said to me, "You can't polish a turd." Wise words.

David DuChemin

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.

David DuChemin

#20. For millennia our suffering has been the forge in which great art has been made and great lives have been lived.

David DuChemin

#21. 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

#22. 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