News,  Tickle Your Fancy

Photography & Art – Tickle Your Fancy #46

Welcome back to our forty sixth post in our new section Tickle Your Fancy. Tickle Your Fancy’ includes a round-up of between three to 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 really hope you enjoy these articles over the weekend…

Mary Ellen Mark Obituary

Mary Ellen Mark was truly a remarkable woman both as you imagine and also in reality – the two do not always correspond. My husband met her just a few years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s something he will always hold close.

The following obituary in The Guardian two days ago, gives a very good insight and viewpoint of Mark’s precious life’s work. I’ve mentioned many times within TheAppWhisperer, that I enjoy reading well written obituaries; not for morbid reasons but because the writing is usually very good. To condense a life within a national newspaper’s limited word count, is always something I admire, as writing is one of my prerequisites in life, as is photography as is reading, I try to read a solid book each week.

Read the obituary here

Image – Mary Ellen Mark delivering an award at Cannes Film Festival, 2009 – ©Kevin Carter

I just noted her final tweet…

The Day Albert Einstein Died: A Photographer’s Story

Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and reshaped our ideas of how the universe works, died on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse.

Armed with his camera and a case of scotch — to open doors and loosen tongues — Morse compiled a quietly intense record of a 20th-century icon’s passing. But aside from one now-famous image — of Einstein’s office, exactly as he left it, taken hours after his death — the pictures Morse took that day were never published. At the request of Einstein’s son, who asked that the family’s privacy be respected while they mourned, LIFE’s editors chose not to run the full story, and for more than five decades Morse’s photographs lay in the magazine’s archives, forgotten.

Read and view more here.

Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

A History of Nautical Camouflage

Dazzle painting was created during the first world war to protect British naval vessels from German attack. The jagged, almost psychedelic designs were inspired by the work of the vorticists, and have influenced modern artists such as Peter Blake, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Tobias Rehberger – each of whom has created their own tribute to this extraordinary artistic movement.

Boats pass HMS President designed by Tobias Rehberger, 2014 – Photograph: Alamy

Read more here

How Ford Models Changed the Face of Beauty

When Eileen Otte and Jerry Ford eloped to San Francisco in November 1944, in the midst of World War II, it was hardly surprising that Jerry should declare his profession as “Naval Officer” on his marriage certificate. His new spouse, however, set down an occupation that was more unusual in a time of war, “Stylist,” and she listed her employer as a “commercial photographer.” Earlier that spring, around the same time the young couple first met, Eileen had embarked on the career path that would lead to her creation with Jerry of what would become the Ford modeling agency.

Read more here.

Eileen Ford and her husband, Jerry, juggle phones and field requests for Ford models in the agency’s New York office, 1948.

Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; By Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

A Scholar of Pigeons

Chloé Roubert has been to Paris, London, Montreal, Toronto, Shanghai, Frankfurt, and New York, cultivating herself as a pigeon scholar. “I’m kind of following my pigeons,” she said on a recent morning on Stanton Street, in lower Manhattan. “My home is everywhere, because they are everywhere.”

Roubert, who is thirty-one, was in town scouting locations for her latest endeavour: a pigeon tour of the Lower East Side for the New Museum’s “Ideas City” festival, which starts today. She has pale skin and dark hair flecked with gray. She wears thick-rimmed glasses and, that day, a trench coat. For the past year, she has been wandering through the neighbourhood, noting pigeon behaviour, taking photographs, and talking to the people who linger on the street—those feeding and watching and growing attached to the birds, leaving the occasional can of cat food (accepted, though pigeons don’t usually eat meat) or dumping out an unfinished loaf of bread (a crowd forms, and there’s a long wait for a spot around the crust). She has found that pigeons, like many New Yorkers, are bagel-eaters, immigrants, and scavengers, and are put off by new high-rises that are inhospitably spiffy.

Read more here.

Pigeons don’t live long in New York—their typical lifespan is two and a half years—elsewhere, they can live to be six.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX MAJOI / MAGNUM

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]