Marc Provins

I'm off to get a haircut. Funny what the universe can tell you when you are out and about. 

Along with many of the residents of the East End of London, my parents set up home in Essex in the late 1960's which means I'm lucky enough to have Basildon on my passport as my place of birth (cough). Sadly I only got to spend the first two years of my young life there before being whisked off to rural Gloucestershire. However to this day for some reason I always associate moulded concrete blocks used to build perimeter walls with Basildon. I don't know if this is a phantom memory or actually a very early memory but it's stuck. Anyway these two photographs were made on separate occasions but seemed to work as a pair, architectural space making a visual link between the two very different materials and colours. I've never returned to Basildon but feel it could be a rich source of photographic inspiration. Watch this space, so to speak.

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...

My thoughts are still being influenced by seeing the William Klein and Daido Moriyama exhibition at Tate Modern last week. Amazing how pictures can get under your skin and colour how you see everything after that. I've also just watched the William Klein Imagine show on the BBC, wow what an interesting, complex character. His approach to photography is very different to mine, although as Martin Parr pointed out in the programme we are probably all children of Klein. Strange how the avant garde soon becomes the mainstream.  I also watched some inspiring video clips following Moriyama out and about in Tokyo with his camera and immediately felt a kinship with him. For a start he uses a small compact camera and takes many photographs everyday, quite instinctively, being in his 70's doesn't seem to get in his way. He says: "My approach is very simple - there is no artistry, I just shoot freely. For me, photography is not about an attempt to create a ...

I'm a big fan of large photographic prints placed in the urban landscape, its something we seem to see more and more, usually advertising of course.  It often creates a sense of disorientation, a surreal mix of the physical and two dimensional, two examples here taken on consecutive days during the London trip.

Keep right, out of context makes me think it is some kind of instruction from the powers that be to do the right thing, be good, stay out of trouble...  A few more pictures from our London trip, picking up on some blue in the city. Surprising how calm it can seem in such a large town if you duck out of the crowds and explore the back streets.