David Duchemin - The Heart of the Photograph: 100 Questions for Making Stronger, More Expressive Photographs

ONCE YOU START READING, it wont take you long to see that the subtitle of this book is wildly misleading. There are many more than 100 questions in this book.

This is a book of questions, many of which are intentionally vague, questions to which you may never find one single answer, nor should you. But it is important that you ask them all the same, because it is the search for possible answers, with camera in hand, that will produce for you the best photographs of your life. By that, I mean the strongest pictures of the life you live, the experiences you have, the moments and people that stir your heart and give your life meaning. It is through questions, and your pursuit of the possibilities they represent to you if youll look earnestly for the answers, that you can best learn this craft in the way you long to know it.

The path to intuition and instinct begins with intention. It begins with learning to see things and think about things in new ways.

Before you begin, I want to have a word together, as though we were sitting in a cafe somewhere in the world, sharing stories and a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and the subject came around to the way we learn our craft, which is not far off from what is really happeningme sitting here with my cup of coffee imagining what I would say to the person to whom I write this: you.

It would be very easy to read this book in one sitting, to blaze through it in search of a few spells or incantations that give you a nudge here or there, secrets that reveal to you some new insight that changes everything. They arent here. But the keys are. The questions I pose, and others that will come to you as you read, are the keys. It is you asking them, chasing down answers of your own, and wrestling with them, often while shooting, that will open your mind to new directions and new understanding.

In reading this book, it would be easy to get overwhelmed. I imagine you cracking the spine and looking up, already defeated, and asking if Im serious. Do I really expect you to ask every question in this book before you make a photograph? Its not possible. Its not realistic. Its probably not even humane!

Several years ago, someone wrote a criticism of my encouragement to photographers to be more intentional and thoughtful about their photographs. He wrote, I didnt pick up a camera to think this hard. Perhaps this explains why so many photographs seem so unintentional and thoughtless, and why they lack any real impact. I think we can do better.

I think most photographers long to photograph intuitively, to be able to pick up the camera and respond with something like instinct, to see the lines, the light, the moment, and do something with them quickly enough that they make a photograph that engages us, stirs our emotions, or grabs our curiosity before that moment is gone forever. I think its that longing for the ability to create intuitively that made my critic say what he did. He just wanted the process to be more like what Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain called a state of grace in making photographs. I do too.

But wishing and hoping are notoriously poor ways of achieving what we long for. The path to intuition and instinct begins with intention. It begins with learning to see things and think about things in new ways. It begins with internalizing techniques and creative possibilities, then making them our own. Thats what learning is. And questions, as teachers as far back as Socrates and millennia of rabbis know, offer the best path toward that end. You dont need me to teach you. You need better questions so you can teach yourself.

So, before the coffee gets cold, here is my plea: dont get overwhelmed and start looking for shortcuts. Craft is a long game. Craft takes intentional focus, applied over time. For some of you, just the awareness of these questions will be a tremendous help and provide greater creative freedom. For others, youll need to ask these questions many timesas you photograph, as you edit your photographs, and as you study the photographs of othersbefore they become your own. But as you get used to asking them, they will become more and more subconscious, the way your mother tongue did as it became more and more a part of you and required less and less conscious effort to recall the right words. Thats when youll begin to discover the intuitive or instinctive moments, the states of grace that come when youre in the momentreceptive, aware, and able, like a great musician, to improvise with the instrument in your hand.