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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 21 March 2021
Marcel Proust describes, In Search of Lost Time, his own experiences of ‘involuntary memories‘, these are profound and unexpected glimpses of the past triggered by mundane and everyday experiences. Escaping time, is in essence the affect of ‘involuntary memories‘, they return us to past events. Photography, is the perfect medium to use as the physical connection to illustrate and explore this. Susan Sontag pronounced that, all photographs are memento mori, to take a photograph is to participate in another persons (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt. (Sontag, 1979: 15). According to Roland Barthes photographs…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 1 December 2020
“It cannot be a conincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum. The museum’s naturalistion of photography as art is the conclusive victory of the century-long campaign waged by modernist taste on behalf of an open-ended definition of art, photography offering a much more suitable terrain that painting for this effort“, On Photography, Susan Sontag, . And so, is the becoming of mobile photography and art as we all continue to elevate this artform and there are none so better artists to do so, than the…
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Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 19 July 2020
There is and there always has been a vast difference between a photographer and someone who is interested in photography. David Hurn (Hurn, D and Jay, B. On Being a Photographer. (3rd ed.) 1997. Pp.43-44) explains that the person who becomes a photographer in not interested in photography as an end result but uses photography to pursue an intense interest in something else. This is a very important point because otherwise, photography only becomes about the hardware and it is so fitting in respect of mobile photography. Although mobile photographers are interested in the latest smartphone, iPad’s, the latest add on lenses, filters etc, I have noticed, that that interest…
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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,…
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Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 10 May 2020
‘Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness’, said author Garth Greenwell. The author of a new book, ‘Cleanness’ which I have yet to read, as I am currently rereading his debut ‘What belongs to you’, a book that has served Greenwell, so well. It’s not the subject that draws me as much as the equisite literature that soaks every line. However, I believe good art can be the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness. The kind of art that worms its way into a person’s being, art that imbues our lives, illuminating our innermost thoughts with eloquence, compassion. Art teaches us to be more…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 April 2020
Influenced by Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson and Elaine Scarry, ‘The Art of the Body’ by Alexander Allison has perhaps been my fastest read yet. Not that there’s any race with reading, but sometimes, it’s so impossible for me to put a book down, that even when making dinner, I’ll prop a book open and this is what happened to me during this further week of lock down 2020. ‘The Art of the Body’ is a book about a woman, Janet, who cares a lot. She cares about what people think of her, she cares about the opportunities she’s wasted, she cares about the hurt she’s caused. But Janet is also…
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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.…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 February 2020
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties“, writes Erich Fromm, one of the most prescient thinkers of the 20th century. Love and creativity play a huge part of my life and it is physical. Love of art, the art of loving, irrational, intellectual, obsessive, insightful. Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London, proved in a series of pioneering brain-mapping experiments that viewing art triggers a surge of dopamine, the feel-good chemicial, into the orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, resulting in feelings of intense pleasure, the same part of the brain that is excited, when we fall for someone, romantically. For all of us associated with…
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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,…
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Mobile Photography – Instagram TAKEOVER with @gilliannb – Gillian Brodie – Days 8 – 14
Wow!!! What an incredible fortnight it has been with @gilliannb – Gillian Brodie taking over our Instagram feed! Her vision, curation and commentary has been exemplary, we have loved every post and have published these from day 8 to 14 below. Brodie has included images from Ile Mont, Karen Axelrad, Tuba, Eliza Badoiu, Janis Brandenburg, Amanda Parker, Robin Cohen, Lorenka Campos, Alexis Rotella, Patricia Leeds, Laurie Amerson and Elaine Taylor, all great and established mobile artists. Please take a look at their and Brodie’s work below. To read the previous posts in this series, please go here. Thank you so much dear Gillian Brodie for a fabulous fourteen days, what…
