PRESS RELEASE
                                        

                                                                  “Safelight”, Marc Provins

                                                          03 december 2009 - 17 january 2010

“Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.”

Neil Postman, 1990.

I have worked as a Lecturer since the year 2000.   For the last few years I have had to explain film grain to students by comparing it to pixels in a digital image rather than the other way around.  For me this marked a changing of the guard, this is the first generation of young adults to have only known digital photography.  

Thresholds between opposites is a repeated theme in my work, whether it is the self and the universal; foreground and background; real and imagined; colour and monochrome.  As a continuation of these ideas I am creating a body of work around the transition from chemical to digital photography.  My practice is concerned with exploring the medium of photography itself, through experimenting with the rules, laws and expectations of the photograph.

Safelight is a series of long exposure portraits all made under safelights in a college darkroom. The subjects are all young people studying photography looking back at their tutor the photographer.

Marc Provins 2009