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Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 13 February 2022
‘Jane Austen, Daphne Du Maurier, the Brontës and Beatrix Potter all found liberation from the strictures of society and the freedom to express themselves (and indeed be themselves) in the British countryside’, says Mariella Frostrup who has a new series on More4 (if you’re in the UK) entitled ‘Britains Novel Landscapes’. Austen was not all prissy manners and corsets, she wrote her books during the Napoleonic wars and Hampshire, where she lived, was packed with soliders. When we choose to think of her as a war novelist we begin a fascinating re-evaluation of her words. Those balls in vast mansions were not all landed gentry fun, they were transactional business…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 6 February 2022
You may have heard of Dr Megan Poe, she is a 46 year old psychiatrist and associate professor who teaches an undergraduate course on love, which she designed at New York University. It has achieved overwhelming success. The course is called ‘Love Actually’ and attempts to pack as much about the human experience of love in, as is possible. The course leans heavily on the work of Eric Fromm, the psychologist best known for his 1956 book, The Art of Loving. What I love about the syllabus of this class, is at its core, albeit a psychology class, its emphasis is on love, through art. As described in The Guardian…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 9 January 2022
I like to create targets for myself, that way, it helps me to keep on schedule and achieve what I intend to do. For so long, I’ve been reading one book a week and by doing so, it allows me to travel, throughout the world, there’s a sense of freedom I experience with each page turned. This week I’ve been reading a novel about economic migrancy, called The Road Home. A subject we’re all aware of but so often ignore. The author Rose Tremain tackles the issues brilliantly. The main character, Lev is 42 and has left his Russian home following the recent death of his beloved wife from leukemia…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 September 2021
What is remarkable about your vision, as mobile artists, is that it remains intensely human rooted in common experience, replete with doubt, frustration but also conjoined with belief and certainity. Characteristics demonstrative of our obsession with this new medium. As your journey through this weeks showcase to the centre of the lyrical and artist narrative, your destination alludes to the ultimate climax and is swiftly tempered by the safety of its harbour. This showcase is at the frontier of the world of mobile photography and art. Enjoy! If you would like your work to be considered for entry into our weekly Mobile Photography and Art Flickr showcase, please submit it…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 13 December 2020
And breathe… soon I will be writing to you all to ask for your New Year Resolutions for 2021 and I want it to plunge us into a world so finely contoured, so throbing with gentility, that it surges and crescendo’s with an intensification that speaks volumes. Use it to free yourself, to make choices and you might be surprised by the person who reveals herself. Today, enjoy this love letter of a showcase, etiquette dictates this one deserves a standing ovation. Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this week. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our…
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Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 6 September 2020
Many photographers draw on literary influences on which to base their images. Hannah Starkey used Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem The Lady of Shalott as a reference point for a body of work exhibited at Maureen Paley Gallery in 2010. In the poem, The Lady of Shalott is subject to a curse. She is only able to view the real world refectled through a mirror. Temptation ensues and she sneaks a glimpse at a knight’s shining sword, looks out of the window and dies. This is a very brief gist of the poem but the idea is that if you only view the world through shadows of reality through reflections…
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Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 23 August 2020
Not all self-portraiture includes the photographer, sometimes it is possible to use other people to stand in. I mentioned Sophie Calle‘s work last week and her series ‘Take Care of Yourself 2007-2009), is an example of this. Some photographers use people in a metaphoric sense, I’m thinking of Maria Kapajevea, in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, 2012-ongoing’) or some choose not to include anyone in the picture at all (Nigel Shafran, Washing-up 2000). All of these approaches are classified as self-absented portraiture, similar to self-portraiture but none include the photographer in a literal sense. In many ways, physically, I have started to feel that maybe I…
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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…
