-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase 3 October 2021
Sadly, I have never attended a Edward Hopper exhibition, there was one in London in 2004, but I couldn’t make it, few shows have reached higher visitor numbers at Tate Modern. Hooper’s draw for me was his unique ability to exquisitely paint urban experiences of loneliness, separation and distance with such clarity and intelligence. One that touches me, perhaps more than others in his work, is entitled Automat. This word in American refers to self-service restaurants, where diners would collect their meals from vending machines, the establishments did not employ waiters or waitresses. Once a customer collected their meal, they would sit with it, generally alone. It makes the absolute…
-
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 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…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 22 March 2020
22 March 2020, Mother’s Day, England, “fear educates our care for each other – we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a person’s life might be made even more miserable and we do whatever we can to protect them because we have a fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraidd of this fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of life“, observed poet Anne Boyer. This week, like many of us, I’ve immersed myself in art, both written and visual. I found myself, once more, drawn to Bleak House by Charles…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 3 November 2019
“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…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 1 September 2019
It hasn’t happened many times to me, but the strength of desire was too strong to ignore, irresistible actually. I had to return to the beginning of The Parisan and start all over again and this time, when I reached the end, the feeling to begin again and was even stronger than the first time. This is a masterful debut novel by Isabella Hammad, it’s historical fiction. A young man, a Palestinian is sent by his father to study medicine in France at the beginning of the First World War. He spends several years in France, liberating and transformative years before returning to Palestine. Along the way, he falls in…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 7 April 20019
After scoring a hat trick, I am back! As some of you will have noticed, I was off last week. Not one to take life easy, I managed to cram it with, Mother’s Day, my 50th birthday and a serious lung infection. An accomplishment even by my own standards. The lung infection leading the way, I spent my days and continue to do so, (desperately trying to avoid another hospital admission), dosing up with antibiotics, sleeping sitting upright (it can be done, I’ve learnt, once complete exhaustion sets in) and reading a wide variety of books. I got it down to two books every two days, a record for me.…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 6 January 2019
There’s much humour to be had at my nightstand, not least in the morning when my husband duels with balancing fresh coffee on the piles of books and there’s a particular book, which I feel should be on every woman’s nightstand ‘Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur. It’s a book of poetry, about healing and hope, discussing themes of love and loss, bringing about an enlightened self. Kaur ends the book with a tender love letter to her readers, thus reads “you have made it to the end. With my heart in your hands. Thank you. For arriving here safely. For being tender with the most delicate part of me.…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 5 August 2018
Photographer, Mary McCartney (Paul’s daughter), with whom I used to work at a London photo agency said, “I’m embarrassed to say that my main camera is my iPhone”. That’s not to say she doesn’t use 35 mm film, a Leica in fact, or a DSLR, even a Polaroid, but what she loves about her iPhone is ‘how immediate it is‘. Contrasing with Grayson Perry, artist confession, ‘the cameraphone has made the forest of glowing screens ubiquitous in museums, galleries and at events. Maybe I’m a snob, but it’s put me off photography’. We take thousands and thousands of pictures, every single day, do we treasure them? Some we do, each represents…
-
Mobile Photography – StreetWise Winter 2017 / 2018 Showcase
“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” Bruce Gilden Hello Everyone! Thank you for submitting your images to StreetWise Flickr group for our ‘Winter Showcase.’ We were touched by the soulfulness and warmth of your photos – beautiful winter scenes (whether in tropical or snowy settings) of people (and animals) looking out windows, windows as frames, windows reflecting cityscapes, people in public transportation, carrying umbrellas, lone figures in urban landscapes and photos of people connecting hand in hand, or embracing one another. Even in the…
