Photo as Story

David duChemin is a photographer who often works abroad shooting for humanitarian groups. His work is excellent and if I could take pictures half as good as his I might not be studying aviation mechanics right now. Click here, then go to "classic india" at the bottom of the page, and you'll see what I mean. (Not for those of slow bandwidth)

He blogs too, and a recent post had something I really liked:

There exists, in a photograph, nothing but what is within the frame. Without the frame there is nothing - so the profoundly difficult task of the image-maker is to put as much story, conflict, and emotion into the frame as possible while at the same time removing as many elements as possible in order to tell that story with total clarity. It is to order the elements so the eye of the viewer reads the image in the right order. The task of the storyteller is guide the reader, the viewer, through the image and to come to a sense of those great universal themes. Most of us will only do this well, and consistently, when we begin to think more like a storyteller.

Now that's the kind of picture I want to take someday.