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…
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 4 July 2021
“Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you”, said Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist in her book ‘Why we Love’ and it’s true. It’s incredibly distracting, falling in love and yet it is perhaps the greatest natural high there is. When you mix Oxytocin – the love hormone with a good amount of Dopamine (the pleasure hormone), you get a very heady mix, perhaps you could say, it makes us insane but what if you’re not looking to fall in love and it creeps up on you when you least expect it…then that’s not walking on air, that’s flying by the seat of your pants… Can falling in love be diagnosed?…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase 18 April 2021
To nourish our souls we must become familiar with emotional honesty as a term, as well as a reality, we should all embrace it if we want to experience anything but raw emotional tinnitus. This weeks mobile photography and art showcase is an act of love. It represents life with all the intricate layers it tells. Fiercely intelligent, honest and entertaining this is a very satisfying immersion with close emotional focus at its heart, making it one of the most captivating showcases we have published. Enjoy! If you would like your work to be considered for entry into our weekly Mobile Photography and Art flickr group, please submit it to…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 11 April 2021
When my beautiful daughter leaves home for university later this year to read law, there is a book I’ll slip in the bottom of her case, indeed it is a book that I have bought for friends in the past, to help them work through some feelings at difficult times. It is a book by Charlie Mackesy, he was a cartoonist for the Spectator as well as a book illustrator for Oxford University Press but more importantly than that, he is the most kind and generous artist who only wants to give. It consists of conversations between the characters, who match the title of the book – The Boy, the…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 4 April 2021
“The feelings of desperation and unhappinness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappinness stretch your whole sensibility”. A quote by Francis Bacon but one I disagree with. Rufus Wainwright once admitted that he was terrified to settle down into a happy relationship, because without the emotional drama that came from all those dysfunctional love affairs, he was afraid of losing access to ‘that dark lake of pain’ he felt was critical to his music. I disagree that we should all be addicted to suffering, we need to be able to trust pleasure and utilise it to help create art. Too many artists…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 7 March 2021
Reminiscing about touch… can you recall when you last touched someone that does not live with you? I can, it was when the brunette and I were in ‘our’ secretive riverside café eating home-made cakes and drinking freshly brewed cappuccinos. Chocolate cake for the chocoholic and carrot cake for myself. The staff are also the owners of this café and a mutual embrace is the norm for their regulars. It leaves an inner glow that lasts long after the visit is over, usually into the following week for me. But like all ‘non essential’ businesses in this pandemic, it has been closed for a year now. This is resulting in…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 21 February 2021
With incredulous timing, Robin Dunbar’s latest book ‘Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships‘ has been published, when so many of us are experiencing acute loneliness. In the United Kingdom, we are still under the strictest lockdown rules and many of us are shielding too, signifying we cannot leave our properties, at all. We are craving human contact with our friends and families and we worry if they or ourselves will end up being just another sad statistic on the news. Dunbar’s book helps us to understand how physical friendships, whether romantic or platonic activate our endorphin system, nourishing our bodies and our brains. Without its release, we…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 22 November 2020
Portraits and Dreams a rare book by Wendy Ewald has been revised and expanded since it was first published in 1985. Officially described as ‘an American masterpiece‘ and no wonder. I have the newly updated version which has already sold out. The content a completely fascinating account of children living in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in 1975. Ewald’s photography project enabled the children themselves to take photos of their dreams and in somecases nightmares, as she gave each child their own camera to capture what they saw and what they imagined through the lens. This book demonstrates not only the fantasy but also the reality of these children…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 15 November 2020
Developing an impregnable sense of self confidence should be the basis for a contented life but however, it is often the first stumbling block. Artists’ falter more than many professions with this, perhaps not so much as comedians, both occupations involve risks but without taking them, we cannot grow. Self-acceptance should never be elusive, it should be something we spend time on encouraging in ourselves as well as honouring in others, never losing the former. Eventually this Covid-cloud we are all living beneath will pass over, but whilst it is still here, its more important than ever to be gentle with our handling of ourselves and with each other. Increased…
