Candle and Mattress

The light is interesting today, bright and autumnal, so I took my camera on the short walk from my house to the allotment this morning. I'd taken five or six pictures by the time I'd got to the top of my road as suddenly everything looked interesting. I was thinking about the Henri Cartier-Bresson quote:

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

I usually write a photography quote on the board for each lesson with my second year students but had forgotten to find one yesterday, so one of the students found this corker. Anyway I ended up wondering how many photographs I'd made so far in my life, and working out it must be at least 50,000, probably considerably more!

So my favourite two images from today seem to work well together for my eye thanks to the mix of deep red and silver. The candle was literally shining out of the shadows and stopped me in my tracks, thought I was having some kind of epiphany for a moment.

Comments

A Lovely Pair of Pins

I knew the expression 'pins' referring to legs but had to Google what the Cockney rhyming slang comes from. It looks like 'pins & pegs', but there are some great alternatives like 'bacon & eggs' and 'dolly pegs'. I think I might start trying to incorporate more Cockney into my everyday speak, I do have London roots but they are more South (Saff) London than East London, where I think it originates. Anyway this is all to illustrate a new picture that sits quite neatly with an older picture. So brogues, legs and a sea view from my two main muses. This might be turning into a set... Oh by the way the top view is Morecambe Bay and the lower image is from The Wirral looking across towards Wales. The North West of England is a beautiful place, with some stylish residents.

Linda McCartney Video Commission

If you'd like to access my cyanotype video workshops, they are still live on The Walker Art Gallery website: Cyanotype prints for beginners Advanced cyanotype prints

Exquisite Corpse

I've gathered this project together here, although it really just started as instagram posts and me keeping myself entertained/ creative through the early weeks of the pandemic. On reflection, although it looks visually different from my usual work (black and white rather than a focus on colour) the themes that emerge are similar. This is how I've made sense of it: These images are inspired by the exquisite corpse parlour game first played by the surrealists around the time of the 1918 pandemic. In my interpretation each picture is a self-portrait made up of my silhouette and graphic elements found on my Lockdown daily walks in the suburban landscape around me. Living alone I soon realised the only human form I was seeing on a regular basis was my own shadow. I started making these images using my phone camera and a selection of simple apps at the beginning of the first Covid Lockdown and continued until things returned to some kind of normality in mid...

Marc Provins

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