Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 4 August 2019
Sleepy, exhilarated and refreshed, having spent time with talented mobile artist and dear friend, Linda Toki from the United States in Kew Gardens yesterday. What joy! To me, there’s nothing quite like ‘sealing the deal‘ of a ‘social media‘ friendship, with meeting in person. Our intellectual circles overlap, our mutual interests conincide and our views of the world chime together. Supple, incisive with infectious warmth and humour, what a gift of intuitive turns and juxtapositions yesterday turned out to be. My body felt so stuffed with good luck, I almost woke up this morning choking on it. My advice, to anyone who doubts the relevance of true online friendship, is…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 21 July 2019
“Music has charms to sooth a savage breast” wrote the poet William Congreve in 1697 and apparently non more so than Marconi Union’s ‘Weightless’, which I have attached to our showcase this morning. Many of us are aware of the soothing qualities of music upon our souls but now it seems science can back up those claims. Recently, a clinical trial in the US compared the levels of anxiety felt by patients who were prescribed the drug Midazolam and others who were told to listen to this track, ‘Weightless’ by Marconi Union. Those involved in the study were having a spinal nerve block. I’ve had several of these, not recently…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 19 May 2019
“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,…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 May 2019
My daughter’s school prom this week manifested into the creation of a taut, magnificently controlled week, with smidgen’s, in my case, of personal survival. The entire week was one of lucid reflection as the period of her school days came to an end with an almost surrealist picture of her leavers celebration. The limpid clarity as an observer and witness to the life changes as she transgresses can only be compared to Claude Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism. I end this week, with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears, knowing that the true emotional nature…
Mobile Photography & Art – Tickle Your Fancy #62
Welcome back to our sixty second post in our Tickle Your Fancy section. ‘Tickle Your Fancy’ includes a round-up of between seven to eight links to articles from around TheAppWhisperer over the past few week, that you may by chance have missed. Please note, I’ve been a little unwell this week, so have not published as much as I wanted to. Just to explain the title for this section Tickle Your Fancy is an English idiom and essentially means that something appeals to you and perhaps stimulates your imagination in an enthusiastic way, we felt it would make a great title for this new section of the site. Artists cited include…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 March 2019
‘Thank you for sleeping with us’, read the headline on my bill as I checked out of a hotel in Amsterdam this week. It amused me ‘thank you for sleeping with us’, why would they use that expression? Was it a nod to the infamous red light district around the corner? Being thanked for sleeping with someone, is a little patronising, don’t you think? I’ve not been thanked for sleeping with anyone before, neither have I returned the sentiment. If I was, I’d feel as if I had just completed a service, as opposed to sharing a vivaciously intimate moment. Or were they implying, how important it is to sleep…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 March 2019
Why does anything exist at all? I’m an optimistic, don’t worry, but it’s a question which we all spend our lives trying, increasingly strenuously to avoid. Human life, is always held up against the massive fact of nature, impervious and indifferent to man. If we knew our exact end of life date, would we live our lives differently? When humans have brushed up close to death, they do live differently. I know that I do. I was lucky to survive at 24 years old with very serious liver tumours and luck really did play the main part in my survival. Consequently, I have felt on borrowed time ever since, I…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 February 2019
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” ― Toni Morrison, Beloved. I read a lot as a child and I still read a good deal as a adult. Beloved, by Toni Morrison is one book that I read as a teenager, that really stayed with me. My great friend Rachel and I were hungry for literature, we read the same books, at the same times and then studied and reviewed them together. Rachel went on to teach A level literature at a grammar school. Beloved is not an easy read, compared I suppose with something like To Kill a Mocking Bird and by saying that, I…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 16 December 2018
What is remarkable about your vision, as mobile artists, is that it remains intensely human rooted in common experience, replete with doubt, frustration but also conjoined with belief and certainity. Characteristics demonstrative of our obsession with this new medium. As your journey through this weeks showcase to the centre of the lyrical and artist narrative, your destination alludes to the ultimate climax and is swiftly tempered by the safety of its harbour. This showcase is at the frontier of the world of mobile photography and art. Enjoy! Thank you to all artists for submitting your works. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr Group Showcase – 11 November 2018
‘Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism‘ what perfect timing, if you pardon the pun. Kristen R Ghodsee has published a thoroughly researched exploration proclaiming that capitalism is bad for women. She argues, adopting some ideas from socialism ‘women will have better lives’ and of course, this includes sex. Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. In this book, she analysed many facets of a woman’s life – work, parenting, sex and relationships, community and authority. One chapter, entitled “Women: Like Men, But Cheaper,” she discusses women in the…
