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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase 28 June 2020
The desire to belong is one of the greatest driving forces behind TheAppWhisperer.com’s longevity. Roles of photographers and artists have changed throughout history and to many, they can be lonely or isolating pursuits but it is the facility to identify within the structure of a collective, that individuals seek counsel, share ideas and pull each other forward to the benefit of each and everyone. Together, we have created one of the world’s most enduring and successful collectives. Its formation was not incidental, it was born from international experience of 20 years of photographic journalism and discontent with mainstream media’s portrayal of mobile art practice. During lockdown I have been agitating…
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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 – 7 June 2020
It’s no secret that I have been romantically linked with a vast number of visually literate artforms over the years. Art raises awareness and elicits empathy for the matters at stake but sometimes we have to bend the message towards a more subjective and conceptualised direction. When I make art, it’s intimate, romantic, dramatic, confessional, I am metaphorically seduced. I’ll never tire of romance, it’s the only vice I have and my production is expeditious. Collectively, we have to believe that art has this power, this charisma, potential for magic and you don’t need to look further than this weeks Mobile Photography and Art showcase for that. Enjoy! If you…
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Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 31 May 2020
“The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon the possibility of freedom – and thus its significance – in a world dominated by apparatuses [cameras], to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us”. A quote from Towards a Philosophy of Photography by Vilém Flusser, 2000, I’ve been reading this week. It’s an interesting account modelling a distinction between ‘light writing’ (photography) and writing text itself. It’s a good academic…
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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…
