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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 6 October 2019
One of the treatments I have commenced at hospital this week, is to take part in a six week course of Chi Kung and I’ve been practising it at home ever since, much to the amusement of those who I share my life with. Chi is considered to be the flow of energy through the universe. It is said to flow through channels in the human body and if blocked can lead to poor health. Chi kung involves performing movements that stimulate the flow of chi through the body. As such, it is often referred to as “meditation in motion”. You don’t need to be fit or athletic to do…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 22 September 2019
The three of us, our bodies sharing a common goal and process, the same level of exhaustion reached – potentially. Coming together, tearing apart. Despite the degradation of our bodies, we pushed through. Toll was the point, haggard breaths, sweating foreheads, shaking thighs, pushed to the limits, exhaustion was the symptom but not the goal. The late night service station off the motorway, still somewhere far up North, was stark. But contained pockets of human existence joined by essential basic common needs, in the dead of the night. A millennial loved up couple, cuddled in the queue, ecstatic with the elation of food quashing their hunger, the woman pirouette’s around…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 28 July 2019
‘Would you like a cappuccino?‘ the early morning shadow, prickly with dark stubble, leans over, breathes into my ear bushing my lips. I am asked the same question in the same way, every single morning and still I tingle. The answer is always the same, ‘yes, please, x 3‘ . And so the narrative begins, bringing together two lives, in an emotional and intense drama. We have been in love for many years and each day we develop new neural pathways to ensure we keep meandering along in the present, not only with passion and compassion but also with love and humanity. We are promiscuous observers of photography and art, there’s…
