Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 8 November 2020
When I think of still life, I revert back to its origins in painting. The ‘still’ often represented as flowers, fruit or other decorative displays. Created in history as a means for an artist to practice techniques but also to portray their wealth. It also acts as a reflection of time. What we never see is the human figure, still life is a means to communicate truths and stories about humanity. Still Life is all around us, it’s where we once were, or where we will be next. It offers another sense of life, a different way of seeing. It matters because we matter, still lives is what keeps us…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 18 October 2020
We try to make magic here at TheAppWhisperer.com as often as possible and I am very excited to announce that this week has been no exception… having bonded with Steve and Janet Wozniak (Woz) – Apple co-founder and his wife, four years ago, over our love, care and admiration for Carolyn Hall Young and her works, if you missed that please go here. I felt I should write to Woz once more and this time to share The Quilt Project – arguably considered to be one of the 21st century’s most important poetic pieces and a defining staple of mobile art. Now that we have published the official book for…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 11 October 2020
Forty two years ago, in 1978, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) delivered a press release for a photographic exhibition presenting major shifts in photography over the previous twenty years. John Szarkowski was head of the photography department at MOMA at the time and he believed that these changes were repositioning photography as an artform in America, calculating a new cutting edge structure to the medium. “The two creative motives that have been contrasted here are not discrete. Ultimately each of the pictures in this book is part of a single, complex, plastic tradition. Since the early days of that tradition, an interior debate has contested issues parallel to those…
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 – 17 May 2020
Art therapy has the power to relieve trauma and I believe it should be used widely to help survivors rebuild their lives. There seems to be a general consensus that more should be done to end slavery and trafficking but still it is an area of criminal activity that appears to be on the rise, even as we now find ourselves in lockdown. Art therapy itself covers various forms, drawing, photography, painting, but it’s still not widely implemented in a role of healing for victims. This is a disparity that some aid organisations are not embracing, I wonder if it is because some donors are unprepared to invest in this,…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 23 February 2020
Sally Brampton (founding editor of Elle magazine, UK – who killed herself after health professionals ‘missed opportunities to offer her help’, in 2016) said in her memoir on depression: “We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval: ‘He fought so hard.’ And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.” And so, this week, my thoughts have been with the local family of a 15 year old boy from my daughters school who killed himself.…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 26 January 2020
“Genuinely, I couldn’t give a damn about wrinkles, or middle age or putting on weight or my first grey hairs or reading specs – these are reasons to celebrate”, said Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor in her new moving memoir entitled ‘Dear Life’. These are very similar words that I heard from our dear friend and artist Carolyn Hall Young, who stayed with all of us until her passing. Books by doctors have become extremely popular over the past few years, they bring the reader closer to worlds they may have indeed been a part of but on the other side of the fence. My eldest son Jake,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 6 October 2019
One of the treatments I have commenced at hospital this week, is to take part in a six week course of Chi Kung and I’ve been practising it at home ever since, much to the amusement of those who I share my life with. Chi is considered to be the flow of energy through the universe. It is said to flow through channels in the human body and if blocked can lead to poor health. Chi kung involves performing movements that stimulate the flow of chi through the body. As such, it is often referred to as “meditation in motion”. You don’t need to be fit or athletic to do…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 11 August 2019
This weeks climactic mobile photography and art showcase is an irresistible blend of portraiture, street, still life, landscape and more, guaranteeing a sugar rush of delirious enjoyment. Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this week. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our weekly Mobile Photography and Art Flickr Group, please submit it to our dedicated group, here. You can also submit images to our Instagram tag for this section #theappwhisperer. sunflowerof21_365 – Elaine Taylor, Lydia Cassatt, Eliza Badoiu, @elisrealize – Elis, @bonobostonecreations – Bonobo Stone, @after.1st.illumination – Jane Schultz, Anca Balaj, @vadqcooper – Vicki Cooper,…
