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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 29 August 2021
It is interesting when you think about ‘selfies’, the word of the year adopted by the Oxford Dictionary in 2013. From the early days of photography, photographers have taken photographs of themselves. Hippolytee Bayard, created photography’s first self portrait in 1840. He actually portrayed himself as a drowned man. It is said he created this image in response to what he interpreted as a waste of his extensive research when the French government overlooked his efforts in preference of Daguerre’s process. Bayard’s selfie is interesting because it is a deliberate attempt at creative expression. Of course, since then many photographers have created selfies as an artistic expression. We’re going to…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 23 January 2021
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger discusses Rembrandt’s self portrait painting when he was aged 58 and contrasts this with an earlier self portrait painting when he was 28 – thirty years apart, explaining that the latter portrait only reveals ‘an advertisement for the sitter’s good fortune, prestige and wealth’. It was painted in 1634, in the year of Rembrandt’s first marriage. He is flamboyantly showing off his bride, not knowing that withing six years she will be dead. The painting is cited to sum up the happy period of his life. It was also during this period of history that oil painting was betoken to be ‘a celebration of…
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Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 20 September 2020
As photographers it can be difficult to know when not to take a photograph. Sometimes these moments are out of our control, perhaps based on ethical, moral or religious grounds. When I look back at the times I chose not to take a photograph one moment stands apart from the others. It was early morning and I was on a train enroute to my job at a paparazzi photo agency. I had a window seat, which was unusual and I noticed her immediately. It was the billowing blue floral dress that caught my eye, it was so summery, so joyous and yet the weather was bleak, cold, dark and it…
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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…
