Tickle Your Fancy – #21 – NSFW
Welcome back to our twenty first post in our new section ‘Tickle Your Fancy’. ‘Tickle Your Fancy’ includes a round-up of five links to articles from around the internet that have specifically interested us during the course of the week. Ones that we feel are relevant to your interest in photography and art.
Just to explain the title for this section ‘Tickle Your Fancy’ is an English idiom and essentially means that something appeals to you and perhaps stimulates your imagination in an enthusiastic way, we felt it would make a great title for this new section of the site.
We hope you enjoy this weeks’ selections…
Image: © Tod Seelie
Bright Nights with Tod Seelie
Fascinating interview with Tod Seelie an incredible New York City photographer who discusses topics including the challenges of photographing naked people, funding models for the arts, tall bike jousting and so much more! His new book Bright Nights has recently been published and it’s fabulous.
Artist Sophie Calle – Otherwise known as the French Tracey Emin
Totally fabulously eccentric (even for us) Sophie Calle is a fascinating conceptual artist, who looks nothing like one. Her outward ‘sensible’ exterior masks an intriguing and quite indiscreet self. She’s been a stripper, ‘almost’ a prostitute, perhaps even a stalker. Her latest work has nothing to do with sex, instead it focuses on capturing people’s intimate and personal moments. This interview explains more about her art discovery, how it evolved and even mentions her desire to seduce her father, she’s certainly not backward in coming forward and it shines through in her photography.
Steve McQueen Director of ’12 Years a Slave’
I can’t wait to watch this film, it’s hugely important. In this comprehensive interview Steve McQueen discusses his childhood, growing up in Ealing, London, the racism he endured at school and beyond and also a ‘painful secret he has never confronted’.
Alain de Botton – Art as Therapy
A subject very close to my heart, Alain de Botton discusses whether visual arts can offer a similar solace as music therapy. He selects various art works and discusses their ‘art therapy effect’. This is a fascinating read, at one point Alain discusses Claude Monet’s ‘Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lillies (1899)’ – artwork that most of us are very familiar with. He says, ‘The worry might be that the fondness for this kind of art is a delusion: those who love pretty gardens are in danger of forgetting the actual conditions of life, which include war, disease and political error and immorality. Audiences need art constantly to remind them of this kind of material, sophisticated types will propose, or they might end up deluded as to what life is actually like.
But this is to locate the problem in completely the wrong place. For most of us, the greatest risk we face is not complacency; few of us are likely to forget the evils of existence. The real risk is that we are going to fall into fury, depression and despair; the danger is that we will lose all hope in the human project.
It is this kind of despair that art is well suited to correct and that explains the well-founded popular enthusiasm for prettiness. Flowers in spring, blue skies, children running on the beach … these are the visual symbols of hope. Cheerfulness is an achievement and hope is something to celebrate’.
He also discusses Love and explains our need for love and also how we’re moved by the needs of others, also a symbol of love.
National Geographic Photographer Martin Scholler
A very interesting interview with one of the most renown portrait photographers in the world. Very poignant and heavy with influences including the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Click above to view.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
One Comment
Carlos
Nice piece from NG Martin Scholler.