A collection of visual ideas produced by the student artists of Western New Mexico University while working with adjunct faculty member, Tyler Bingham (Spring Semester 2011).
Purchase“If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
-Robert Capa
“Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important."
-Paul Strand
“Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks."
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in."
-Steve McCurry
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."
-Diane Arbus
“I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
-Galen Rowell
“Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner."
-Author Unknown
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh."
-Edward Weston
“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
-William Thackeray
“The more you photograph, the more you realize what can and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it."
-Eliot Porter
“The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world."
-Orson Welles
“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera."
-Lewis Hine
“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved."
-Bill Brandt
“Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers."
-Matthew Brady
“Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision."
-Sebastian Smee
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in this deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night; must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, so say what you see 225 and experience and love and lose. Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offer you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty—describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
Rilke, R.M. (1993). Letters to a young poet. (M.D. Herter Norton, Trans.) New York: W.W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1929)