Ah the selfie. No more shall we surrender control of our photogenicity to others. We can shoot to our heart's content, or until we get an acceptably fabulous picture of our naturally beautiful selves.
But what are we missing? As we switch to front camera, what's going on elsewhere? Are we really the most interesting thing in our space today? I am not a great selfie taker. I always end up squinting or looking angry (although, admittedly that could just be my face). So I decided to play around with the idea and show both the selfie (yes, my ugly mug) and what was going on on the other side of the camera at the time. Work in progress. The public transport in Athens has been free for the last two weeks due to the economic, political and social crisis. So I decided to ride the trains. The idea was to carve out a trail of interesting observations as I zoomed across the city in various modes of transport. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked with another issue. But that didn't stop me spotting a few really strange little scenes that I thought I'd share. There's an interesting project by Spanish artist ELTONO that involves walking, observing and creating art with what you find. Check it out here http://www.eltono.com/es/projects/promenades/
There's no better place to catch the wind than the trees. Here we see a blustery dance along the River Miño in Galicia, Spain. what I hadn't expected was the light display the swaying branches would produce. This video is part of my ongoing #thefourelements project It is really all around us. Who'd have thought that Japanese artist, Hokusai, might have found inspiration in a glass vase in Asturias, Spain, for his famous Great Wave off Kanagawa? Street Soundtracks is a project I've just started that looks at taking street music and using it as a soundtrack to images from the very street it's being played on. It's mobile phone recording of course, but it seems to work. Here I've included the first three videos made on a visit to the UK. You'll see how they develop from the first to the third. Every Sunday a crowd gathers on the riverbank in Arcos de Valdevez, Portugal, to play music and dance. Nothing more: no alcohol needed, no pro dancers or musicians brought in to entertain. Just the neighbours - young and old (although mostly old) getting together for a shindig.
Recorded on a mobile phone (not gonna tell you which one) A B&W photo every day for five days. Photos to be taken on the day. Good pressure. the first in a series of posts about the beauty of mobile phone photography You wouldn't need to go back even a year to have found me swearing I would never be writing this post. I certainly wouldn't have expected to be not only writing it but writing it on a mobile.
Of course, it was all out of ignorance, and a little bit of hard-headedness. My only exposure to Instagram was witnessing the inevitable death of creativity as it succumbed to retro-style filters and selfies and photos of feet on beaches. The idea of owning a smart phone almost literally made me vomit. Why were people paying large amounts of money to effectively isolate themselves from the world around them? (note: in many ways, this point still stands) Having said all this, there had always been a sticking point for me; I had quickly got tired of carrying my chunky DSLR camera around everywhere and was therefore frustrated that I never had it on me. I'm not talking about going on safari. I'm talking about popping down the shops for bread and spotting something interesting about the peeling paint on the florists' walls.
Desperate for some sort of mini-project on a recent visit to the islands of Cape Verde, I ended up with this series of "street-fronts".
There are some really colourful houses in Cape Verde. The rate of growth seems to be skyrocketing though, so there's also a lot of bare concrete houses yet to be finished. |
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