INTERVIEW

The Canadian wildlife photographer gives Niall Hampton a flavour of his latest book Light, Space & Time, and his talk at The Photography Show

Bear in the Chilcotin River, British Columbia, Canada.

David duChemin

Author of a dozen books about photography and two collections of monographs, David duChemin will be one of the headline speakers at The Photography and Video Show at London’s ExCeL in March. Highly regarded for his wildlife photography, duChemin is also a deep thinker about the craft and you can ponder many of his ideas in his latest book: Light, Space & Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity. On sale now, it’s a book about the photographer rather than photography, as he says in the introduction: “The single most important part of the camera is the 12 inches behind it: your mind.”

DuChemin’s talk at The Photography and Video Show will explore some key themes of the 20 chapters in the book, so it promises to be a must-see – remember that all talks at the show are free this year. Ahead of his arrival on stage at ExCeL, we sat down with duChemin to find out more about his new book and the talk that it will inspire…

Your photography journey has been an interesting one – please summarise it for our readers.

‘Circuitous’ would be a good word for describing it. When I was 14, I picked up a camera at a garage sale at a neighbour’s home. And something about it just made sense. All my other endeavours, playing the guitar and so on, none of it made sense to me. None of it clicked the way that the camera did. And that began, as it has with so many people, a love affair with the still image. I thought for a while about going professional after school, and then I realised very quickly that if I did that, I would end up being a wedding photographer and making decisions that were purely for financial reasons, and I didn’t feel that I was ready to do that. I followed a photographer for a couple of days as a high school student and realised very quickly that there was an awful lot more to photography that was not about taking pictures – I spent time cleaning the darkroom, sweeping the floors and things like that.