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DMC 110

Published By: Bingham's Lens

A collection of visual ideas produced by the student artists of Western New Mexico University while working with adjunct faculty member, Tyler Bingham (Fall Semester 2009).

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Selina Garcia

“Photography is a human act and therefore subjective, a selective act and there interpretive. This makes it possible for photography to be an art, for photographers to achieve a personal style - and for the camera to lie.
- Arthur Goldsmith”

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Jarrod Johnson

“View with a light eye and an open mind."

-Jarrod Johnson

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Ken Abeyta

"My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it."
- Sam Abell

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Aaron Brunson

“Continual failure is a road to success - if you have the strength to go on."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ronnie Baca

“The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice."
- Robert Adams

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Rafael Castro

“If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up."
- Robert Mapplethorpe

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Nathan Reynolds

“No Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.
- Walker Evans

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Martha Ramirez

“I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature."
-Wynn Bullock

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Letters to a Young Poet

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send the 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 the 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, to say what you see 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 offers 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. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.— And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into you own world versus come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.


Rilke, M.R. (2002). Sonnets to Orpheus: with Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Routledge.