Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 8 November 2020
When I think of still life, I revert back to its origins in painting. The ‘still’ often represented as flowers, fruit or other decorative displays. Created in history as a means for an artist to practice techniques but also to portray their wealth. It also acts as a reflection of time. What we never see is the human figure, still life is a means to communicate truths and stories about humanity. Still Life is all around us, it’s where we once were, or where we will be next. It offers another sense of life, a different way of seeing. It matters because we matter, still lives is what keeps us…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 1 November 2020
‘An attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’ is a book written by Georges Perec and it’s quite wonderful. Perec wrote down everything he could see from a specific viewpoint, which happened to be a public piazza in 1974. He recorded people in the street passing by, the traffic, the birds, a wedding and a later funeral, litter, signs, signals, everything. It’s an elaborate and possibly obsessive glimpse into how the mundane detail can become a series of intimacy and remembrance. As this week in the UK and most of Europe plunge back into ‘lockdown’, or perhaps ‘lock up’ is more appropriate and we all await with shuddering uncertainty the…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 25 October 2020
Memories often provide a great access point for creating a body of work artwork. I’ve been looking at a series entiteld “if you get married again, will you still love me?“. Essentially, separated fathers were asked for memories of words spoken to them by their children. Utilising this information and based upon the spoken responses and what images they invoked in the artists mind, Sharon Boothroyd tried to understand what the children may have been thinking or feeling at the time. The series presents emotional moments, often out of view from the public space, of fathers with their children or children contemplating their new life not living with their father.…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 18 October 2020
We try to make magic here at TheAppWhisperer.com as often as possible and I am very excited to announce that this week has been no exception… having bonded with Steve and Janet Wozniak (Woz) – Apple co-founder and his wife, four years ago, over our love, care and admiration for Carolyn Hall Young and her works, if you missed that please go here. I felt I should write to Woz once more and this time to share The Quilt Project – arguably considered to be one of the 21st century’s most important poetic pieces and a defining staple of mobile art. Now that we have published the official book for…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 4 October 2020
“However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that-from time to time-you feel life’s sweet caress.” Words to live by as told by William Boyd in his sixteenth novel, Sweet Caress. This week you’ll notice a audacious, sweeping, rich layer cake of a showcase, a gasping hall of mirrors of lives, well lived. Enjoy! Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to ourshowcasethis week. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our weekly Mobile Photography and ArtFlickr Group, please submit it to our dedicated group,here. You can also submit…
Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 20 September 2020
As photographers it can be difficult to know when not to take a photograph. Sometimes these moments are out of our control, perhaps based on ethical, moral or religious grounds. When I look back at the times I chose not to take a photograph one moment stands apart from the others. It was early morning and I was on a train enroute to my job at a paparazzi photo agency. I had a window seat, which was unusual and I noticed her immediately. It was the billowing blue floral dress that caught my eye, it was so summery, so joyous and yet the weather was bleak, cold, dark and it…
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…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 16 August 2020
Walk with me.. I’ve been lecturing on Sophie Calle this week. Calle became known for creating emotional artwork from her own personal experiences. She once spontaneously followed and photographed a stranger, a man, all the way to Italy. Another time, she found a lost address book and interviewed and photographed everyone within it about the owner and then published the results in a French newspaper. One time, she chanced a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, just so she could photograph all the mess and details left behind. Even before my dear friend Tracey Emin portrayed her famous bed, Calle opened up her own bed and invited strangers…
