Mobile Photography & Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase 28 June 2020
The desire to belong is one of the greatest driving forces behind TheAppWhisperer.com’s longevity. Roles of photographers and artists have changed throughout history and to many, they can be lonely or isolating pursuits but it is the facility to identify within the structure of a collective, that individuals seek counsel, share ideas and pull each other forward to the benefit of each and everyone. Together, we have created one of the world’s most enduring and successful collectives. Its formation was not incidental, it was born from international experience of 20 years of photographic journalism and discontent with mainstream media’s portrayal of mobile art practice. During lockdown I have been agitating…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 14 June 2020
“In these last decades ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it”, Sontag, S. On Photography (1979). Sontag argued that beleaguering the public with sensationalist photographs of war and poverty was a definitive way to numb the public’s response. Sontag believed that the more distressing images people viewed, the more immune they became to their impact; viewers became reduced to inaction, either through guilt or a dismissive lethargy towards making a difference. Sontag reversed this view in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), but ‘compassion fatigue’ is still used as an argument against war imagery today. I have been thinking about this a…
Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 24 May 2020
“When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accomodate”, John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972. The way in which we see things is affected by what we already know or what we believe we know. By making a distinction between imagery and text as information systems, we know that seeing comes before words but when you read a sentence, you read it from beginning to end, in a linear way; you don’t repeatedly return to different words within the sentence and reread them. When you look at…
Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 17 May 2020
Art therapy has the power to relieve trauma and I believe it should be used widely to help survivors rebuild their lives. There seems to be a general consensus that more should be done to end slavery and trafficking but still it is an area of criminal activity that appears to be on the rise, even as we now find ourselves in lockdown. Art therapy itself covers various forms, drawing, photography, painting, but it’s still not widely implemented in a role of healing for victims. This is a disparity that some aid organisations are not embracing, I wonder if it is because some donors are unprepared to invest in this,…
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 Showcase – 8 March 2020
Clive James the prolific Austrialian author, poet and broadcaster died late last year. I’ve always been a fan of his work, he made his name as a television critic, essayist and wit but he started as a poet and just over five years ago he was diagnosed with leukaemia, emphysema and kidney failure – he described it as ‘the lot’ and he ended as a poet. There’s a particular story I remember reading about James, it goes like this… One time he was going through a creative dry spell. He had written a play for the London stage and it bombed spectacularly. Not only did it ruin his family financially…
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 23 February 2020
Sally Brampton (founding editor of Elle magazine, UK – who killed herself after health professionals ‘missed opportunities to offer her help’, in 2016) said in her memoir on depression: “We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval: ‘He fought so hard.’ And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.” And so, this week, my thoughts have been with the local family of a 15 year old boy from my daughters school who killed himself.…
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 – 25 August 2019
“Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced twenty years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 26 May 2019
“As soon as the vote of Brexit came through, half the people I know were trying desperately to work out whether they had Irish grandmothers. But I would never take dual German nationality because I owe this country too much, and I wouldn’t want to dilute it”. Deeply loyal, Judith Kerr speaking in the Financial Times in 2017. Commonly known, within Britain, as our ‘national treasure’, Kerr led a remarkable life and wrote and illustrated the most enchanted children’s stories. I was so saddened to read that she had died this week, born in 1923 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Weimar, Berlin. Her father, Alfred was a famed theatre…
