Marc Provins

Ferns are one of my favourite plant species, I can remember running my hand across them walking in woods as a child, the feel of their gentle fronds has stayed with me. They look like aliens in spring, gradually reaching out, unfurling. Then beautiful in autumn resting on each other suspended above the mulch that they will soon become part of. 

There was no sight of this plant when I moved into my home last December. But gradually, steadily it grew to be about a foot taller than me in a season. It was grand and sculptural all summer but has now begun to droop, ready to disappear back into the soil during its dormancy. Apparently its shapes form the decorative detail on Corinthian columns, a little bit of classical Greece in a Manchester front garden.

The leaves are leaving.

I've often come back to thresholds in my work, the transitional space between one place and another. It feels like we are on the cusp of change at this time of the year; plants in retreat, shorter days, longer shadows.  Ends and beginnings. 

It's always curious when you realise two separate trains of thought are actually joined up. I started the weekend thinking about how spring and autumn are like two bookends. Spring is about beginnings, colour and shape emerging from the slowly warming earth, autumn is nature going out with a bang, flaming colours falling as the earth starts to cool and the days shorten. I started experimenting creatively with ways to respond to the colours around me, in my garden, allotment and the streets that join them.  I stopped, it wasn't working. Then I bumped into a good friend that had just bought a DVD called 'Advanced Style', a film made by photographer Ari Seth Cohen and film maker Lina Plioplyte. I bought it too. It's an inspiring documentary about women in New York aged between fifty and one hundred years who don't see 'maturity' as an obstacle to looking amazing. In fact they are all avant grade in their approach to their looks, wonderful characters i...

My life as a grower and my photography practice seem to be converging, happily. I spent the morning attempting to tame the wilder elements of my allotment. The brambles creeping through from the wasteland next door are now so big that they tower over me by several feet. I've been waiting to pick the last of the blackberries before hacking them back.  It was a beautiful autumn day with strong, low sun that helped draw attention to the incredible colour palette all around me, very different even to a few weeks ago. So along with my harvest of apples, tomatoes, raspberries and the last of the wild blackberries I snipped a few of the leaves and blooms of the non edibles. The afternoon was then spent experimenting with these on the floor of my box room, lit by the same light that had illuminated my morning work.  Fingers crossed for this coming Wednesday as it's the Blog North Awards, where this very blog is shortlisted in the Arts & Culture categ...

I've had three days of walking the streets with my camera, no rain and not much sun either, just Manchester autumn light and a fine wet mist suspended in the air. The colours have been extraordinary, pavements carpeted by leaves on fire with oranges, reds and yellows. Everything I photographed looked super saturated thanks to the giant white cloud reflectors in the sky, bouncing down an even light across our sodden city. So here's two fingers to those who hanker after summer months, lets embrace all our seasons before global warming steals them away.

A combination of really bad weather and a very busy time at work have meant that I've not posted on my blog for a while. In fact it's the longest gap for a couple of years so I'm happy to rectify that situation by catching the light slipping away today.  This scene seemed the perfect counterbalance to my last entry in terms of light and shade and is in fact just a small paper art piece on top of my 1950's filing cabinet, dust and all. If you missed my last entry please have a look for the sake of equilibrium in the universe: SHADES OF GREY

Given the right attitude it is possible to grow to like almost anything, even a motorway. I say this as driving back from my parents' home this morning it struck me that the M6 and M5 have acted as a long and winding tarmac umbilical cord over the years.  I grew up in Gloucestershire and although they're not in the same house my mum and dad are still there. Strangely, over the years I seemed to keep moving up the M5 and then the M6, going to college in Birmingham, university in Staffordshire and then on to Manchester. So we've had decades of visiting each other by travelling up and down that same stretch of highway.  The clocks went back this morning, and I woke up thinking about the aide-mémoire 'fall into winter, spring into summer'. It's definitely autumn and whilst talking to mum in her garden I couldn't help noticing the hair like seed heads of one of her clematis. This also happens to forge a further link between our two homes as I have...

The world has looked starkly alive for the last few days, as we have enjoyed a surprise return to summer like weather. The sun never gets high in the sky as we head into October and so the shadows can be long and dramatic, the colours heightened. I started thinking about how spring and autumn are transitional seasons, new life in the spring and everything starting to retreat in autumn. But actually I suppose really all seasons are transitions, one into another, a constant cycle that is easy to take for granted. I've been experimenting with sampling colour from pictures and then using them as part of the final image. I like the purity of a single colour extracted from a photograph laid out bare to be examined. I'm fascinated by how the world around us is understood by technology, in this case a camera and a computer running software that enables them to interpret light and colour. To them the colours in these three pictures are known ( from top to bottom)  as...

Three quotes from some old school photographers, and three pictures from me... “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.” Henri Cartier-Bresson “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”  Diane Arbus “Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”  Alfred Stieglitz

I've been thinking about the exotic recently which might seem odd as I was walking down the Kings Road in Stretford at the time. However I was wondering if what is ordinary to me is exotic to someone else, after all familiarity breeds contempt, apparently.  I was pondering on the fact that Sally Mann, William Eggleston and a range of other American photographers document the 'local', the things they see everyday and are all around them. To me their pictures take me somewhere else, to places I've not been and so I was wondering is South Manchester a curious novelty to people in other continents? Just at that moment I reached a bridge that I've never noticed before, that crosses the tram tracks running parallel to the road. It is behind the houses so quite discrete, but the light was such that it's strange dated Metrolink colour scheme was glowing. As I walked across it I realised it was covered in Morrissey and Smith lyrics and other related graffiti. A ligh...

All the South Manchester hydrangeas that I photographed in the summer are changing into their autumn and winter season colours. Those pinks and blues have gone, replaced by reds, greys and browns. The colour shift seems strangely patchy and unpredictable, and equally amazing against our northern red bricks. Watch this space for updates and check out the original project, PH6, here: PH6

Today Mike Stephens and myself were training our first year photography students to be young Flâneurs. We rather threw them in at the deep end as it was their first experience of film cameras, so we will find out tomorrow how they got on when they've had a chance to process... Anyhow, I tried to lead by example and had an hour to mooch around, Flâneur style.

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.