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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…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase 3 May 2020
I would ponder many of us are presently negotiating the past and reimagining the future in this current knotty dissonance. I continue spending my time performing love by work. It’s a time of radical reinterpretation, one where each deeply personal meditation enables me to explore how time changes our relationship to place, other people and to ourselves. My visceral journey continues with an observation of an ekphrastic body of work and experience, built over the past thirty years, where anything other than art that is intellectually and aesthetically exciting, is abhorred. We rail against the impotence of travel but I can personally dispel the pernicious myth that time travel is…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 29 March 2020
It is a glorious spring day outside, there was a beautiful dawn chorus emitting from the garden birds this morning, the flowering bushes are starting to blossom. There’s a cold east wind but the piercing sun heats up our glass roofed conservatory, where I am writing this column with so much warmth, I envisage I am basking on a warm coastline, cocktail in hand. Of course, the realisation that Coronovirus was going to be a very serious problem came to me several weeks ago. My husband was interviewing a photographer in Northern Italy, before the lockdown, but after the schools had closed. He spoke about all the teenagers hanging around,…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 December 2019
The life of an artist encompasses many avenues, one perhaps that I am frequently reminded of is the need for solitude, to create. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people‘. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree with this sentiment, like many, it depends on the company. Orson Welles said ‘we’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone’, I disagree, I was fully present when my three children were born, I’ve never lived alone and nor would wish to and I’d be surprised if I die alone. I have experienced a death of a loved one, who died alone but many of the deaths I have experienced, have…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 November 2019 –
I live in a built up area, as you might imagine, but when I stopped off at a petrol station, in the dark and pouring rain, to fill my car up this week, I was silenced into hushed awe. I lined up a pump, got out and opened the filler cap, whilst the blond captivating man, not disimilar in looks to the iconic Kurt Cobain, in the oposite pump was reaching a crescendo as he squeezed his pump into the fill spout. As first it was an unnerving experience, all the punters filling up their cars were hushed, as if in a theatre, all polite, near silence, no one stopped…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 September 2019
This week, I’d like to talk with you about courage and it’s scary, being creative is a path for the brave. If you lose courage, you lose creativity. Each one of you has hidden treasures within you, as do I and we need to bring them to light and it takes a lot of faith and hard work, not least devotion. It’s important to say ‘no’ at times, I suppose, not that I’m one for that, it’s easy to say ‘no’, you’re off the hook but if you say ‘yes’ then what happens? It’s showtime! There are times, when you might need to lay low, as I have this week,…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 25 August 2019
“Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced twenty years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 30 June 2019
Her body is “like a car that you park in the projects, you don’t leave anything valuable in it ’cause you can’t keep it from being broken into,” a frustrating but all to realistic quote from ‘Baise-moi’ (1993) a novel by Virginie Despentes. The quote calmly describes her friend who was gang-raped, she reasons, ‘at least they left her alive‘. The book itself is about two young women on a revenge sex and killing spree following the gang rape. The author, Despentes, herself was gang raped at 17 and had a knife in her pocket at the time but was too terrified to use it. She writes in her memoir…