This post is inspired by the eBook The Vision-Driven Photographer by David duChemin. This post is also inspired by a documentation about the monk Martin Luther and his influence on the Germans that was broadcasted in the german televison two years ago. What is the correlation of both? – I will give it a try to formulate what holds David and Martin together in my mind.
Martin Luther could not be quiet to circumstances the clerus was responsible for. He was fought and he put his life on the line to tell the world that in the relationship between God and one single person no institution ever should or could play a role. Luther wanted the mind to be free. He wanted people to be good informed and to judge autonomic. This dates back for nearly 500 years now and we still are struggling to build, sustain und evolve democracy.
Now, what to do when you – thanks to Luther and a lot of others – are free from constraint? What to do when you are and feel responsible and you do not like to be a part of an unaccountable mass? What to do when you are an individuum willing to be a emancipated person and a part of a human collective? You should perceive, sence, think about, digg deeper, …, judge, plan, act and be reflective.
David duChemin is a photographer and a teacher for photographers and he reminds us in his books to intentionally create photographs that are expressing in the clearest way what we want to say. This expression – and this is my thought – is a necessity when we want to be an emancipated person and want to shape our life and our society. David duChemin reminds us that writers, painters, musicians … express their feelings and thoughts with other languages and other tools but the process is the same. Like photographers – and let me add – all other emancipated persons – they have to figure out how they percieve the world they live in, they have to figure out what they want to tell the other individuums they want to reach and have to figure out how to successfully communicate.
David duChemins topic is personal and photographic vision: “We all have vision, the question is: are we aware of it? Personal Vision is how we see life whether or not our eyes are open. It grows, it changes, it flip flops depending on where life takes us and that makes it the challenge it is. You think you understand it, catch more than a fleeting glimpse, and maybe you do for a while, but one day you wake up and it’s changed for some reason and you have to rediscover it all over again” (p3). “It’s an endless journey” (p23, David duChemin: The Vision-Driven Photographer).
If you do want to create rich in content photographs, poems, songs … I think it´s worth to have a look into the eBook The Vision-Driven Photographer.
If you use the promotional code DRIVEN4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of The Vision Driven Photographer for only $4 OR use the code DRIVEN20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST November 28th, 2010.
