Marc Provins

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 performance