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 – 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 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 – 9 August 2020
The chronological picture or photo essay is something that is often repeated in contemporary photography and can be very compelling. Linear picture narratives guide us from a beginning point to an end point which is in line with classical ways of forming narrative. The sequencing of the images is important in ordering the unfolding narrative; we’re guided by the photographers intentions. However, there’s an important difference between the picture essay (or story) and a piece of classical prose. A writer will give you the information they want to tell you in a precise order that you, as a reader, aren’t in control of (unless you read the back pages first).…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 29 March 2020
It is a glorious spring day outside, there was a beautiful dawn chorus emitting from the garden birds this morning, the flowering bushes are starting to blossom. There’s a cold east wind but the piercing sun heats up our glass roofed conservatory, where I am writing this column with so much warmth, I envisage I am basking on a warm coastline, cocktail in hand. Of course, the realisation that Coronovirus was going to be a very serious problem came to me several weeks ago. My husband was interviewing a photographer in Northern Italy, before the lockdown, but after the schools had closed. He spoke about all the teenagers hanging around,…
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.…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 November 2019
Many people write to me each week and I love it. Sometimes, I am asked for advice, sometimes I’m asked about me. This week a few times, it was mostly the latter. I was asked, ‘how do you keep coming up with ideas?’, ‘where do they generate from?‘ and then ‘how do you deal with a creative rut?‘. I think the latter was the hardest because the first two I answered with ‘I’m constantly gathering ideas, things that I see each day, people I meet, observations that I make, judgements (I hate to say), but they all encapsulate and become the images and ideas that I’ve been having for the…
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 – 28 July 2019
‘Would you like a cappuccino?‘ the early morning shadow, prickly with dark stubble, leans over, breathes into my ear bushing my lips. I am asked the same question in the same way, every single morning and still I tingle. The answer is always the same, ‘yes, please, x 3‘ . And so the narrative begins, bringing together two lives, in an emotional and intense drama. We have been in love for many years and each day we develop new neural pathways to ensure we keep meandering along in the present, not only with passion and compassion but also with love and humanity. We are promiscuous observers of photography and art, there’s…
