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…
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…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 November 2019
Many people write to me each week and I love it. Sometimes, I am asked for advice, sometimes I’m asked about me. This week a few times, it was mostly the latter. I was asked, ‘how do you keep coming up with ideas?’, ‘where do they generate from?‘ and then ‘how do you deal with a creative rut?‘. I think the latter was the hardest because the first two I answered with ‘I’m constantly gathering ideas, things that I see each day, people I meet, observations that I make, judgements (I hate to say), but they all encapsulate and become the images and ideas that I’ve been having for the…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 27 October 2019
I spend everyday thinking creatively, as indeed all our readers do and I would go so far as to say, everyone does in somepart. What does surprise me is when writers bandy around the phrase ‘creative industries‘. I can honestly say, hand on heart, I don’t know of any ‘uncreative industries‘. Creativity is the most powerful competitive advantage any business can possess. New ideas, fresh thinking are the fizz companies to make their business’s pop. There’s this overriding notion that creative artists are cut from a different cloth, this needs to be debunked. Young children overspill with ideas, they cannot hold back. Earlier this week, I was walking one of…
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 – 15 September 2019
“Help I have done it again. I have been here many times before. Hurt myself again today, and, the worst part is there’s no one else to blame. Be my friend, hold me, wrap me up, unfold me, I am small, I’m needy, warm me up, and breathe me. Ouch! I have lost myself again, lost myself and I am no where to be found, yeah, I think that I might break, lost myself again again and I feel unsafe, Be my friend, hold me, wrap me up, unfold me, I am small, I’m needy, warm me up and breathe me….” lyrics to this weeks immaculate mobile photography and art…
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 – 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…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 26 May 2019
“As soon as the vote of Brexit came through, half the people I know were trying desperately to work out whether they had Irish grandmothers. But I would never take dual German nationality because I owe this country too much, and I wouldn’t want to dilute it”. Deeply loyal, Judith Kerr speaking in the Financial Times in 2017. Commonly known, within Britain, as our ‘national treasure’, Kerr led a remarkable life and wrote and illustrated the most enchanted children’s stories. I was so saddened to read that she had died this week, born in 1923 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Weimar, Berlin. Her father, Alfred was a famed theatre…
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 May 2019
“Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware” Anne Lamott. I was told a similar thing, not quite so poetically, when I was promoted and became the technical editor of a print camera magazine, many years ago… it’s long gone. “Many congratulations Joanne, but keep those feet on the ground“, cautioned the main editor of the title. Sound advice, but doesn’t it get a little boring sometimes? For years now, I’ve noticed that I have become more and more sensible and it’s getting frustrating. I’m organised, at least in my mind, it might not show physically in my office. I keep my children’s…
