The Heart of the Photograph

Photographers often look at an image—one they’ve either already created or are in the process of making—and ask themselves a simple question: “Is this a good photograph?” It’s an understandable question, but the truth is that it’s profoundly unhelpful. How are you supposed to answer that? What does “good” even mean?

What if you were equipped to ask better, more specific questions of your work so that you could answer them more directly, and in doing so, bring more specific action and intention to the act of creating photographs? What if asking the right questions allowed you to establish a more helpful and pragmatic approach to your image-making? In The Heart of the Photograph, photographer and author David duChemin helps you learn to ask (and find your own answers to) better questions of your work in order to craft more successful photographs. Photographs that express and connect, photographs that are strong and, above all, yours.

From the big-picture questions—What do I want this image to accomplish?—to the more detail-oriented questions that help you get there—What is the light doing? Where do the lines lead?—David walks you through his own questions and process so that you can establish your own. Along the way, there are discussions of the building blocks from which compelling photographs are made, such as gesture, balance, scale, harmony, perspective, story, memory, symbolism, and much more. The Heart of the Photograph is not a theoretical book. It is an immensely practical and truly useful book that empowers you to ask better, more helpful questions of you and your work so that you can produce images that fulfill your vision and intention for them.