Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 29 March 2020
It is a glorious spring day outside, there was a beautiful dawn chorus emitting from the garden birds this morning, the flowering bushes are starting to blossom. There’s a cold east wind but the piercing sun heats up our glass roofed conservatory, where I am writing this column with so much warmth, I envisage I am basking on a warm coastline, cocktail in hand. Of course, the realisation that Coronovirus was going to be a very serious problem came to me several weeks ago. My husband was interviewing a photographer in Northern Italy, before the lockdown, but after the schools had closed. He spoke about all the teenagers hanging around,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 16 February 2020
Fatigue with the stress of life, current news, financial worries, sickness, broken relationships, abuse, wreak havoc. As I shot my (medicinal) drug needle miraculously through my fingernail instead of my thigh this week, I know and it hurts but there’s also something called ‘compassion fatigue’ in relation to photography. It is so called when people view vast quantites of shocking images, perhaps photojournalism from a warzone for example and they become muted, to the visual atrocities before their eyes. From as early as the 1980’s ‘compassion fatigue’ was also known as ‘Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder’, essentially it developed from an excess of compassion. David Campbell, Director of Programs and Outreach…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 December 2019
The life of an artist encompasses many avenues, one perhaps that I am frequently reminded of is the need for solitude, to create. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people‘. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree with this sentiment, like many, it depends on the company. Orson Welles said ‘we’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone’, I disagree, I was fully present when my three children were born, I’ve never lived alone and nor would wish to and I’d be surprised if I die alone. I have experienced a death of a loved one, who died alone but many of the deaths I have experienced, have…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 November 2019 –
I live in a built up area, as you might imagine, but when I stopped off at a petrol station, in the dark and pouring rain, to fill my car up this week, I was silenced into hushed awe. I lined up a pump, got out and opened the filler cap, whilst the blond captivating man, not disimilar in looks to the iconic Kurt Cobain, in the oposite pump was reaching a crescendo as he squeezed his pump into the fill spout. As first it was an unnerving experience, all the punters filling up their cars were hushed, as if in a theatre, all polite, near silence, no one stopped…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 November 2019
I was delighted this week to learn that 45 year old Ivorian artist, Joana Choumali has become the first African photographer to scoop the Prix Pictet prize, winning with a series of embroidered photographs responding to the trauma of terrorist attacks in Ivory Coast in 2016. The series is entitled ‘Ca va aller‘ – meaning – ‘it will be ok‘, a reference to stoical reaction to adversity that she said permeated Ivorian culture. Her images were printed onto canvas and then later embroidered with stitches directly onto the surface. Combining photographic imagery with fabric and therefore, creating ‘conceptual portraits‘. She created this work ‘as a need to process the pain‘.…
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 – Tickle Your Fancy #64
Welcome back to our sixty fourth post in our Tickle Your Fancy section. Tickle Your Fancy includes a round-up of between ten to twelve key links to articles from around TheAppWhisperer over the past few two weeks, ones you may, by chance, have missed. 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. Artists cited include: Susan Maxwell Schmidt, Clarisse Debout, Oola Cristina, Deborah Field, Deborah McMillion, Yariv Weinberg, Karen Axelrad, Kathy Clay,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 16 June 2019
“To be excellent at anything, it must cost you something“, a direct quote from ‘In Pieces’ by Sally Field. A book that she spent seven years writing, without ghost writers, unusual for her circle. This book made me weep this week. It’s a beautifully written intimate memoir as well as a gut wrenching self portrait, bordering on a personal investigation. Now at 71, Field felt the compelling need to assemble her fragmented past. Contrast that with ‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney, another book I have been reading, a future classic by all accounts and a book the BBC are working on for a new tv drama. It’s a story written…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 28 April 2019
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing, you can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” Words by Anne Lamott, who married this week at Deer Park Villa, in Fairfax, California. She met her husband through a dating site, called OurTime, a matchmaking site for the over 50’s. She had been single for a long period and felt absolutely no wanton feelings to change that. When asked, by the New York Times writer, Lois Smith Brady, 26th April 2019, why she stayed single so long,…
