It feels rather odd, if not completely wrong to be reviewing and in the process, judging a book, painting, a photo or anything authored by not only someone you deeply admire but by someone with decades of more experience that you in the said craft. I shared my affinity for David duChemin in the last blog post and since then, I’ve read the pdf copy of his latest book, The Soul of the Camera: The Photographers Place in Picture-Making.
Name of the book, The Soul of the Camera perhaps isn’t the most obvious one for a photography book but in the context that David mentions, it makes perfect sense. David argues that the Soul of the camera is us, the photographers, the ones holding the camera. It is us and our vision that puts the soul into our photographs.
The Soul of the Camera contains series of essays on topics ranging from gear (The Place of Craft) to Creativity to post-processing (After the Camera).
These essays, each of them about 4-5 pages long build on top of each other; although some more than other. For example, the first essay, The Place of Craft in which David talks about gear is followed by essays on vision and visual language. Each of these essays links – and build on top of the previous one.
Interlude between the essays are some of David’s photographs. These photographs, some as recent as 2016 add to the theme of the book. All of them in black and white, are hardly “perfect” in the technical sense – the highlights are often overblown and shadows often have no details. At this point, I hope it is quite obvious that this is not a criticism of the photographs in the book but rather a comment on how well these photographs compliment the theme of the book.
These photographs also don’t have any technical details (focal length, ISO, aperture etc.) with them. David addresses the reason for excluding these details in the introduction to the book. In his own words –
I hope the absence of that information makes you curious and engages your imagination. Specific information about settings can make us lazy and point us in the wrong direction, giving undue credit to those settings, rather than leading us to a much more complicated, and hard to describe, process of seeing, recognizing light and moments, and so on.
True to above words, I found myself wondering and imagining how these images were shot.
The book is beautifully written and in a manner that perhaps only David duChemin can write. As I alluded to in my foreword to this review, the book is full of quotable quotes from David. Here are three quotes from the book, chosen completely at random.
On patience
If you find a great scene that only lacks a great moment, wait for it.
On authenticity
The idea of authenticity carries such value because we know how difficult it is to be fully ourselves.
On post-processing
Approach editing with a vision, the same way you approach the making of the photograph.
I think The Soul of the Camera is a book that will have a different meaning to different photographers at different points on their journey. The content of the book is philosophical and I was many times I was struggling to stay with what author was saying.
This is where I suspect the average photographer – and I include myself in it – might struggle with this book. The information and the depth of discussion in the book is exhausting. I occasionally found myself leaving an essay half read (with a promise to myself to go back to it later) because it had gotten deeper than what I could comprehend at that moment.
I suspect I’ll be able to stay with the words a little better on a second or a third reading. Having said all of this, I don’t think I would want the book in any other way. I would rather occasionally be left confused, dumbfounded and challenged by a book than completely bored and uninspired.
This book is going to be a timeless addition to my library (not just the ebook but also the signature edition hard copy that’s in the mail) and I can for almost certain say that I’ll come back to it again and again in future.
Unless you are a complete beginner to photography – in which case you may struggle with some concepts even more than I did, I highly recommend you pick up a copy.
You can pickup a copt of the book from the Soul of the Camera website, Book Depository or Amazon (last two are affiliate links). You can also read a sample of the book here.
