-
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 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 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 – 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/Art Pic of the Day (1,228) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and twenty 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 @lizanderson48 with this image entitled ‘Cherry Blossoms to Brighten your Day’. To follow her on Instagram, please go here.
-
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,227) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and twenty seven 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 @nicolasxanthos – Nicolas Xanthos with this image entitled ‘Quarentine 2020’. To follow him on Instagram, please go here.
-
Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,226) via Instagram
Here’s day one thousand, two hundred and twenty six 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 @robertamitchell9675 with this image entitled ‘……unblinking. Self portrait 2020 . .’ To follow her on Instagram, please go here.