Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 25 October 2020
Memories often provide a great access point for creating a body of work artwork. I’ve been looking at a series entiteld “if you get married again, will you still love me?“. Essentially, separated fathers were asked for memories of words spoken to them by their children. Utilising this information and based upon the spoken responses and what images they invoked in the artists mind, Sharon Boothroyd tried to understand what the children may have been thinking or feeling at the time. The series presents emotional moments, often out of view from the public space, of fathers with their children or children contemplating their new life not living with their father.…
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 & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 February 2020
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties“, writes Erich Fromm, one of the most prescient thinkers of the 20th century. Love and creativity play a huge part of my life and it is physical. Love of art, the art of loving, irrational, intellectual, obsessive, insightful. Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London, proved in a series of pioneering brain-mapping experiments that viewing art triggers a surge of dopamine, the feel-good chemicial, into the orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, resulting in feelings of intense pleasure, the same part of the brain that is excited, when we fall for someone, romantically. For all of us associated with…
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 – 4 August 2019
Sleepy, exhilarated and refreshed, having spent time with talented mobile artist and dear friend, Linda Toki from the United States in Kew Gardens yesterday. What joy! To me, there’s nothing quite like ‘sealing the deal‘ of a ‘social media‘ friendship, with meeting in person. Our intellectual circles overlap, our mutual interests conincide and our views of the world chime together. Supple, incisive with infectious warmth and humour, what a gift of intuitive turns and juxtapositions yesterday turned out to be. My body felt so stuffed with good luck, I almost woke up this morning choking on it. My advice, to anyone who doubts the relevance of true online friendship, is…
