David duChemin

Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it__ easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It__ much harder__nd much more needful__o 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.

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.

Arrogance and a teachable spirit are mutually exclusive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.

It__ the difference between your wife__ 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, __he looks like this._ The other says, __his is who she is to me. It__ how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?

A photograph can communicate a couple things_ and sometimes only one thing__ery well. The more you try to say with your photograph, the greater the chance that you will say nothing at all.

As long as we__e alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we__l have something to say.

You are responsible for every element within the frame.

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.

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