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 – 4 August 2019
Sleepy, exhilarated and refreshed, having spent time with talented mobile artist and dear friend, Linda Toki from the United States in Kew Gardens yesterday. What joy! To me, there’s nothing quite like ‘sealing the deal‘ of a ‘social media‘ friendship, with meeting in person. Our intellectual circles overlap, our mutual interests conincide and our views of the world chime together. Supple, incisive with infectious warmth and humour, what a gift of intuitive turns and juxtapositions yesterday turned out to be. My body felt so stuffed with good luck, I almost woke up this morning choking on it. My advice, to anyone who doubts the relevance of true online friendship, is…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 21 July 2019
“Music has charms to sooth a savage breast” wrote the poet William Congreve in 1697 and apparently non more so than Marconi Union’s ‘Weightless’, which I have attached to our showcase this morning. Many of us are aware of the soothing qualities of music upon our souls but now it seems science can back up those claims. Recently, a clinical trial in the US compared the levels of anxiety felt by patients who were prescribed the drug Midazolam and others who were told to listen to this track, ‘Weightless’ by Marconi Union. Those involved in the study were having a spinal nerve block. I’ve had several of these, not recently…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 7 July 2019
“I told you I was ill‘, my favourite black comedy quote, written by Spike Milligan, engraved into gravestone. For many, health anxiety is a compartment of life – a dark cell – usually totally separate from their day-to-day self. Of course, there’s a lot to be anxious about in the world today and this phenomena shows no sigh of shrinking. Psychoanalyst Michael Currie notes that we rarely deal with the causes of anxiety – job insecurity for example, or social isolation – when trying to treat it. Writing in The Monthly, he says: “Anxiety-as-disease is treated much like an infection, as if the symptoms were a bacterium that should be…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 30 June 2019
Her body is “like a car that you park in the projects, you don’t leave anything valuable in it ’cause you can’t keep it from being broken into,” a frustrating but all to realistic quote from ‘Baise-moi’ (1993) a novel by Virginie Despentes. The quote calmly describes her friend who was gang-raped, she reasons, ‘at least they left her alive‘. The book itself is about two young women on a revenge sex and killing spree following the gang rape. The author, Despentes, herself was gang raped at 17 and had a knife in her pocket at the time but was too terrified to use it. She writes in her memoir…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 23 June 2019
This weeks thrilling and thoughtful Mobile Photography and Art showcase projects a sense of artists maintaining their fidelity to the human race, whilst all around many are losing faith, it is at the heart of everything. Each work of art chosen here has a stake in our world. There are counterweights and balances as joy emerges in the work here. This storytelling is far more alive to the possibility of hope, of relationships, uncomplicated love and connections, each representing the intimacy of the long years of support that our community brings to one another. Enjoy. Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 June 2019
As humans, we have the unique ability of utilising our skill of habit, to our own disadvantage. We can fail to take note of what is always around us. Thus, we suffer emotionally because we lose sight of the value of what we have and then yearn for imagined attractions elsewhere. We live on auto pilot. As an example, if you think back, to when first learning to ride a bicycle, we become hyper aware of everything, as we sit on the saddle and place one foot on a pedal and the other on the ground, to steady us. As we try to push off and bring up the other…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 May 2019
My daughter’s school prom this week manifested into the creation of a taut, magnificently controlled week, with smidgen’s, in my case, of personal survival. The entire week was one of lucid reflection as the period of her school days came to an end with an almost surrealist picture of her leavers celebration. The limpid clarity as an observer and witness to the life changes as she transgresses can only be compared to Claude Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism. I end this week, with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears, knowing that the true emotional nature…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 May 2019
“Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware” Anne Lamott. I was told a similar thing, not quite so poetically, when I was promoted and became the technical editor of a print camera magazine, many years ago… it’s long gone. “Many congratulations Joanne, but keep those feet on the ground“, cautioned the main editor of the title. Sound advice, but doesn’t it get a little boring sometimes? For years now, I’ve noticed that I have become more and more sensible and it’s getting frustrating. I’m organised, at least in my mind, it might not show physically in my office. I keep my children’s…
