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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 9 January 2022
I like to create targets for myself, that way, it helps me to keep on schedule and achieve what I intend to do. For so long, I’ve been reading one book a week and by doing so, it allows me to travel, throughout the world, there’s a sense of freedom I experience with each page turned. This week I’ve been reading a novel about economic migrancy, called The Road Home. A subject we’re all aware of but so often ignore. The author Rose Tremain tackles the issues brilliantly. The main character, Lev is 42 and has left his Russian home following the recent death of his beloved wife from leukemia…
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Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 4 July 2021
“Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you”, said Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist in her book ‘Why we Love’ and it’s true. It’s incredibly distracting, falling in love and yet it is perhaps the greatest natural high there is. When you mix Oxytocin – the love hormone with a good amount of Dopamine (the pleasure hormone), you get a very heady mix, perhaps you could say, it makes us insane but what if you’re not looking to fall in love and it creeps up on you when you least expect it…then that’s not walking on air, that’s flying by the seat of your pants… Can falling in love be diagnosed?…
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Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 20 June 2021
It has been said (‘Teenagers: A Natural History’: David Bainbridge, 2010) that teenage years are to develop the brain and as such they are the greatest achievement of evolution – the point where all that is special about our species comes into play. For parents of teenagers, it’s our job to look after them while they are incubating their extraordinary craniums. “Adolescence is the reason we live so long, long, long” says Bainbridge. “Human longevity has evolved because we need to bring up our intensely supported, slowly developing offspring.” And that is of course intensely important, being a parent at this stage is a constant negotiation between keeping them safe…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 7 March 2021
Reminiscing about touch… can you recall when you last touched someone that does not live with you? I can, it was when the brunette and I were in ‘our’ secretive riverside café eating home-made cakes and drinking freshly brewed cappuccinos. Chocolate cake for the chocoholic and carrot cake for myself. The staff are also the owners of this café and a mutual embrace is the norm for their regulars. It leaves an inner glow that lasts long after the visit is over, usually into the following week for me. But like all ‘non essential’ businesses in this pandemic, it has been closed for a year now. This is resulting in…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 7 February 2021
We are all aware life has changed and we can no longer travel or even linger when exercising however, we always have our imagination and of course Google to help us out. Random Street View allows you to teleport to over ten million miles on earth via working in tandem with Google Street View. You can select a country and randomly view where you have navigated to or just let it select a country for you too to explore. So far this morning, I’ve enjoyed sharing the beach on Hong Kong with a couple of brave sports and then I thought I’d visit the US and found myself at 2469-2481…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 22 March 2020
22 March 2020, Mother’s Day, England, “fear educates our care for each other – we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a person’s life might be made even more miserable and we do whatever we can to protect them because we have a fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraidd of this fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of life“, observed poet Anne Boyer. This week, like many of us, I’ve immersed myself in art, both written and visual. I found myself, once more, drawn to Bleak House by Charles…
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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…