Mobile Photography and Art ‘Hope in Adversity’ Interview with Linda M Toki from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States
Today, we are publishing our twenty third interview in our new series, Hope in Adversity. One that’s based around art, artists and isolation during the midst of Covid-19.
This one is with Linda Toki, award winning mobile photographer, artist and friend whom I met at Kew Gardens, last year, when we could at least all travel. She’s a wonderful woman with a great sense of humour, enjoy!
To read others in this series of interviews with Jill Lian, Vicki Cooper, Gerry Coe, Sarah Bichachi, Sukru Mehmet Omur, Phyllis Shenny, Alisa Smith Williams, Joy Barry, Fleur Schim, Fiona Christian, Peter Wilkin, Ile Mont, Lynette Sheppard, M. Cecilia Sao Thiago, Rob Pearson-Wright, Catherine Caddigan, Cintia Malhotra and Susan Latty, please follow this link
If you are social distancing or social isolating at this time, are you using any additional time you may have to create mobile digital art or photography?
Fortunately I am able to tele-work so I am still working. It’s tough to be connected to a computer when the days are growing more beautiful this spring.
I am lucky to have a big property that is well planted with garden areas and the back half is wooded. I keep bird feeders to attract many varieties of birds. I am still creating mobile art/photography, but it has not been the priority.
If so, have you noticed the style of art that you’re creating changing from what you would normally create?
I don’t think my style has changed but I have been trying to infuse magical and whimsical aspects into my photos to offset the current health crisis.
If yes, to the above, can you explain how your art has changed?
In general my art has expanded in that I have started painting again and doing some more hands-on type art.
Have you found additional inspiration to create at this time?
Living in the moment and enjoying the moment has inspired me and my art. I think I am really drawn to photographing the things that bring me joy, like my dogs, rather than creating a piece that is social commentary or anything like that.
Is creating mobile digital art/photography, helping you at this time specially, how and why?
The act of creating and creating art and photography has always been therapeutic for me. I even at one time considered art therapy as a career. That is likely the reason I got an art teaching degree so that I could empower others.
Do you feel that sharing mobile art/photography at this time is spreading a unity of peace?
I feel like all artistic and creative endeavors being shared now support the collective peace. People are coming together.
Anything else you would personally like to add…
I believe that everything that happens, happens for a reason. We are a global community that is still connected and will always be.
When people of the future study art history, they will study us and how we contributed to the mobile art/photography movement and how we stuck together and continued even during this challenge to our way of life. We are infinitely adaptable!
Please read…
TheAppWhisperer has always had a dual mission: to promote the most talented mobile artists of the day and to support ambitious, inquisitive viewers the world over.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
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