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 – 2 August 2020
I think the easiest decision I’ve ever made is in answer to the question of whether I’d like a glass of champagne with my afternoon tea at the Langham Hotel, central London. Oh god, that is not a hard decision to make. I have a collection of great memories, what about that secret room in the bistro in Paris? Oh bliss. And that Bouillabaisse served by waiters who cared enough to even place my handbag on a low stool. When I look back life seemed to be a combination of simple joys with droolworthy salubrious details. I recall walking extremely slowly in the Bois de Boulogne in the 16th arrondissement…
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,298) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and ninety eight of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer. Today, we congratulate @mitrydate – mitrydate with this image entitled ‘Pel di carota’.
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 5 July 2020
Mobile photography and art has a way of forming, shaping and holding in front of our eyes something we feel inside. It’s about storytelling, enabling viewers to develop a narrative of their lives and relate to their own experiences, in a new way. And, it is for this reason that I have curated and published this weeks showcase. Having spent Friday afternoon in hospital for surgery and suffering pain since, unable to sleep, unable to turn, unable to get out of bed, I wasn’t convinced I would be able to put on this show. However, I turned to my mainstay, culture as a cure. And what a great healer it…
Mobile Photography & Art Instagram/Flickr Group Showcase – 21 June 2020
“Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks they speak“, DiCorcia (1993-1994) cited in Galassi (1995). Photography is a language, adopted as a means of expression and communication or as an accompaniment to words. It has its own set of grammatical rules and codes. How we read an image is determined by our own personal background factors. A universal photographic language does not exist when compared to a spoken or written language. Photography as a language is more to do with an interpretation rather than a direct translation of information. Language connects people and it also divides them, any language only works if it’s understood. This weeks mobile photography and art…
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…
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 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 and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 10 May 2020
‘Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness’, said author Garth Greenwell. The author of a new book, ‘Cleanness’ which I have yet to read, as I am currently rereading his debut ‘What belongs to you’, a book that has served Greenwell, so well. It’s not the subject that draws me as much as the equisite literature that soaks every line. However, I believe good art can be the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness. The kind of art that worms its way into a person’s being, art that imbues our lives, illuminating our innermost thoughts with eloquence, compassion. Art teaches us to be more…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase 3 May 2020
I would ponder many of us are presently negotiating the past and reimagining the future in this current knotty dissonance. I continue spending my time performing love by work. It’s a time of radical reinterpretation, one where each deeply personal meditation enables me to explore how time changes our relationship to place, other people and to ourselves. My visceral journey continues with an observation of an ekphrastic body of work and experience, built over the past thirty years, where anything other than art that is intellectually and aesthetically exciting, is abhorred. We rail against the impotence of travel but I can personally dispel the pernicious myth that time travel is…
