Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 11July 2021
I have dedicated my entire life to the pursuit of love and creativity and I spend most of my time encouraging other people to do the same because living a creative life filled with love is the most beautiful life there is. In many ways, the human artistic expression is blessedly, refreshingly, non essential. John Lennon once said about the Beatles, “we were just a band”. Some of the most sublime occasions of my life have been when I have been inspired by the many photographers and artists that I have been lucky enough to surround myself with. The quality of the images submitted to our Flickr Group and Instagram…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 20 December 2020
This weeks mobile photography and art showcase is a narrative on life and for many of us, life right now does not offer the freedom it once did… Freedom seems like a luxury, one we all took for granted. What connects people in this showcase and our community of artists is the ability to express ourselves in the ways we most discern, through our art and we keep at it. The sheer ingenuity that you will view today is elegant and strong, engaging and questioning each piece created by independent minds producing compelling artistry. Enjoy. Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this week. If…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 22 November 2020
Portraits and Dreams a rare book by Wendy Ewald has been revised and expanded since it was first published in 1985. Officially described as ‘an American masterpiece‘ and no wonder. I have the newly updated version which has already sold out. The content a completely fascinating account of children living in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in 1975. Ewald’s photography project enabled the children themselves to take photos of their dreams and in somecases nightmares, as she gave each child their own camera to capture what they saw and what they imagined through the lens. This book demonstrates not only the fantasy but also the reality of these children…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 11 October 2020
Forty two years ago, in 1978, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) delivered a press release for a photographic exhibition presenting major shifts in photography over the previous twenty years. John Szarkowski was head of the photography department at MOMA at the time and he believed that these changes were repositioning photography as an artform in America, calculating a new cutting edge structure to the medium. “The two creative motives that have been contrasted here are not discrete. Ultimately each of the pictures in this book is part of a single, complex, plastic tradition. Since the early days of that tradition, an interior debate has contested issues parallel to those…
Mobile Photography & Art Instagram/Flickr Group Showcase – 21 June 2020
“Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks they speak“, DiCorcia (1993-1994) cited in Galassi (1995). Photography is a language, adopted as a means of expression and communication or as an accompaniment to words. It has its own set of grammatical rules and codes. How we read an image is determined by our own personal background factors. A universal photographic language does not exist when compared to a spoken or written language. Photography as a language is more to do with an interpretation rather than a direct translation of information. Language connects people and it also divides them, any language only works if it’s understood. This weeks mobile photography and art…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 26 January 2020
“Genuinely, I couldn’t give a damn about wrinkles, or middle age or putting on weight or my first grey hairs or reading specs – these are reasons to celebrate”, said Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor in her new moving memoir entitled ‘Dear Life’. These are very similar words that I heard from our dear friend and artist Carolyn Hall Young, who stayed with all of us until her passing. Books by doctors have become extremely popular over the past few years, they bring the reader closer to worlds they may have indeed been a part of but on the other side of the fence. My eldest son Jake,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 November 2019
Many people write to me each week and I love it. Sometimes, I am asked for advice, sometimes I’m asked about me. This week a few times, it was mostly the latter. I was asked, ‘how do you keep coming up with ideas?’, ‘where do they generate from?‘ and then ‘how do you deal with a creative rut?‘. I think the latter was the hardest because the first two I answered with ‘I’m constantly gathering ideas, things that I see each day, people I meet, observations that I make, judgements (I hate to say), but they all encapsulate and become the images and ideas that I’ve been having for the…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 27 October 2019
I spend everyday thinking creatively, as indeed all our readers do and I would go so far as to say, everyone does in somepart. What does surprise me is when writers bandy around the phrase ‘creative industries‘. I can honestly say, hand on heart, I don’t know of any ‘uncreative industries‘. Creativity is the most powerful competitive advantage any business can possess. New ideas, fresh thinking are the fizz companies to make their business’s pop. There’s this overriding notion that creative artists are cut from a different cloth, this needs to be debunked. Young children overspill with ideas, they cannot hold back. Earlier this week, I was walking one of…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 September 2019
This week, I’d like to talk with you about courage and it’s scary, being creative is a path for the brave. If you lose courage, you lose creativity. Each one of you has hidden treasures within you, as do I and we need to bring them to light and it takes a lot of faith and hard work, not least devotion. It’s important to say ‘no’ at times, I suppose, not that I’m one for that, it’s easy to say ‘no’, you’re off the hook but if you say ‘yes’ then what happens? It’s showtime! There are times, when you might need to lay low, as I have this week,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 1 September 2019
It hasn’t happened many times to me, but the strength of desire was too strong to ignore, irresistible actually. I had to return to the beginning of The Parisan and start all over again and this time, when I reached the end, the feeling to begin again and was even stronger than the first time. This is a masterful debut novel by Isabella Hammad, it’s historical fiction. A young man, a Palestinian is sent by his father to study medicine in France at the beginning of the First World War. He spends several years in France, liberating and transformative years before returning to Palestine. Along the way, he falls in…
