Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 19 December 2021
Eighteen months and it still goes on, some say worse now than ever before. I’ve not started disinfecting the groceries again yet though and hope never to start. It is interesting to learn of the impact the pandemic has had on mobile art. We have have asked and published some answers to that by award winning artists here and also in another series here. What seems ever more important is how connected we all are and how much we care for one another. Many of us have experienced isolation, confinement, even claustrophobia and especially depression. Our walls enclosing us, as our government’s fail to govern. We remember our first trips…
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 – 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…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 15 March 2020
“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” ―E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops and the first book that I immediately reread thrice, when I was thirteen. It was the first book that interrupted my thought processes enough to relieve me of outside pressures. It was transient, like a…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 November 2019
I was delighted this week to learn that 45 year old Ivorian artist, Joana Choumali has become the first African photographer to scoop the Prix Pictet prize, winning with a series of embroidered photographs responding to the trauma of terrorist attacks in Ivory Coast in 2016. The series is entitled ‘Ca va aller‘ – meaning – ‘it will be ok‘, a reference to stoical reaction to adversity that she said permeated Ivorian culture. Her images were printed onto canvas and then later embroidered with stitches directly onto the surface. Combining photographic imagery with fabric and therefore, creating ‘conceptual portraits‘. She created this work ‘as a need to process the pain‘.…
