Marc Provins

Listening to Radio 4 this morning has left me both dismayed at the horror humans can inflict on other humans and heartened by stories of selfless acts and heroic actions. All these things happened ten years ago during the London bombings that have come to be known as 7/7.  Ten years ago, in 2005 I was visiting London regularly to make photographs and videos as part of a project called In-between. The work was all made on the London Underground and part of my ongoing exploration of how we interact with the physical world we inhabit, how the space around us informs the space inside us. This particular set of photographs was intended to extend my work on temporary and transient spaces. The pictures were made on a compact digital camera, with me standing on Underground train platforms, taking pictures of passengers moving in and out of the stations, hence the blurring. I started in the January of 2005, but July of that year saw the terrorist bombing on public tra...

This is my mum, the woman who brought me into this world and who nurtured my brother and me, she is still looking after our well-being now. I think the vast majority of the useful things that I've learned in life have been picked up from my mum and dad, they are wise folk. This picture was taken at the weekend whilst I was on a bank holiday visit. I like it as it is more or less how I picture mum when there is distance between us, surrounded by nature, Gloucestershire nature. Her stance makes me think that she is mulling over the bigger picture, as she often does.

I've never really worked out why but my brain gets in a tangle and my tongue tied when I have some time off work. It only lasts for a week or so and then I return to normal. I've come to accept it but it is frustrating and I hear myself saying "thingybob" and "what's his name" a lot. Just had one of those weeks. The pictures are from a couple of lovely days with close friends in the static caravan in Grange-over-Sands, I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

I managed to catch the excellent Format Festival in Derby last week, just before it closed. It has quietly become a major player over the years, representing the best British and international photography, displayed in a range of intriguing venues dotted around the city. I like picking up the brochure and using the map to navigate around town, a place that I only ever visit for the festival. This makeshift tour provides an insight into the place itself as I travel north, south, east and west, getting a bit lost, taking pictures as I go. Like all cities in Britain it has many sides, but I must say that this time it did seem to be wearing some of it's social problems more prominently than last time. Just like in my home town of Manchester there appears to be a growing population of homeless people and some quite visible class 'A' drug imbibing going on right in the centre. This was being nervously observed by perturbed looking office workers eating ...

I visited an old friend in Birmingham last weekend, by old I mean long standing, as she's younger than me and I don't consider myself old yet. We went to university together and shared a house with three other people who are all still close friends too. I suppose you do quite a bit of growing up together at that point in your life and there is a certain intensity sharing a home, and being part of each other's daily life. Those days were fast and long, slightly chaotic and exciting so you don't know if the people around you will always be in your life, in fact I don't think I considered it until it was time to leave.  We watched the recent Madonna interview on catchup one of the evenings and she talked about how we are brought up to believe that family means blood, but actually we create new families for ourselves, people who won't judge, who you can trust, people who are loyal - that's family.  

Every so often I return to photographing people's backs. I like that we have to work a bit harder as viewers; fill in the blanks, imagine a face, an expression. You can't turn a photograph around, well not yet anyway. 

I'm just back from our college residential to Barcelona, which always leaves me inspired and thinking in new ways. This blog entry picks up where I left off exactly two years ago, observing the tourist feeding frenzy in Sagrada Familia.  The original entry is here:  2013/03/evangelical-photographers My feelings are the same as then and without repeating myself too much the experience left me thinking about how we engage with 'culture' in the 21st century. Maybe we are losing the ability to actually look, see, think and respond to the physical world around us as we become obsessed with using our devices to record and share what's directly around us. We end up experiencing everything through a small screen and measuring its value in it's 'like'-ability. It actually makes an incredible spectacle in itself as people lose themselves in framing the world. In the intervening two years the selfie stick has added a whole new dimension to this perfo...