Craft & Vision

Craft & Vision

Back in May I wrote about my great respect for Vancouver-based photographer David duChemin. After reading duChemin’s Within The Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision, I felt like I’d found a real (and far more professionally successful) soulmate. Even his blog’s tag line—“Gear Is Good. Vision Is Better”--tells you that duChemin is about far more than f-stops and shutter speeds.

Well, now duChemin has gone and done himself one better. I strongly recommend that you give his new affiliate site, Craft & Vision a glance. The site serves as a virtual showroom for a series downloadable photographic collections and essays. And just to prove that even though banks told us that ATMs would reduce fees (and didn’t) and digital publishers told us that digital books would eliminate the added cost of hardcopy production (and didn’t), Craft & Vision shows that high quality art can be delivered at an accessible price.

How accessible? How’s $5 a download for you! There’s even a discount if you buy multiple books.

Chasing Reflections

To see how it works, I paid my $5 using Paypal and downloaded the pdf of Eli Reinholdtsen’s Chasing Reflections. It’s a wonderful collection and an excellent example of how new technology can be used to spread art to more people, especially those who can’t afford a library of $100 art books.

Brooks Jensen, of Lenswork magazine, has long championed the idea of making your art accessible. He ridicules those who believe the only real art is $1,000 art. I don’t believe artists should feel any compunction to give their work away; artists have to eat, too, after all. But the kinds of essays and collections being distributed in electronic format by Craft & Vision are a terrific example of how art can be appreciated by many without devaluing the market for those who want to collect and view well produced prints.

I can’t wait to learn how to do this.