Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 19 July 2020
There is and there always has been a vast difference between a photographer and someone who is interested in photography. David Hurn (Hurn, D and Jay, B. On Being a Photographer. (3rd ed.) 1997. Pp.43-44) explains that the person who becomes a photographer in not interested in photography as an end result but uses photography to pursue an intense interest in something else. This is a very important point because otherwise, photography only becomes about the hardware and it is so fitting in respect of mobile photography. Although mobile photographers are interested in the latest smartphone, iPad’s, the latest add on lenses, filters etc, I have noticed, that that interest…
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 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 – 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…
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,269) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and sixty nine 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 @p.a.hamel – Paul-André Hamel with this image entitled ‘Vivement Dimanche!’. To follow him on Instagram, please go here.
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 – 17 May 2020
Art therapy has the power to relieve trauma and I believe it should be used widely to help survivors rebuild their lives. There seems to be a general consensus that more should be done to end slavery and trafficking but still it is an area of criminal activity that appears to be on the rise, even as we now find ourselves in lockdown. Art therapy itself covers various forms, drawing, photography, painting, but it’s still not widely implemented in a role of healing for victims. This is a disparity that some aid organisations are not embracing, I wonder if it is because some donors are unprepared to invest in this,…
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…
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,…
