Martin Parris my favourite photographer. I love the realistic way he presents his subjects.

✤ Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952 in Epsom, Surrey) is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take a critical look at modern society, specifically consumerism, foreign travel and tourism, motoring, family and relationships, and food.

✤ Parr wanted to become a photographer from the age of 14 and cites his grandfather, an amateur photographer, as an early influence

✤ He went to college at the then Manchester Polytechnic College in 1972 to study for his degree.  Whilst at college Martin became influenced by the American photo-documentarists William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and the postcards of John Hinde.  But his preoccupation with domestic and social matters was first shown in the board game he developed called "Love Cubes"!  This featured portraits of couples shot individually and the idea was to rejoin the couples. 

Love Cubes

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Martin Parr In his College Degree Project Sitting Room "Home Sweet Home (1974)

✤ For his degree Martin designed and furnished a room set, decorated with his own framed photos and intended as a comment on the ideas of personal taste.  Titled "Home Sweet Home" it earned him his degree

June Street

✤ In 1972 and in cooperation with Daniel Meadows ("Living Like this" and others) Martin started his journey into documentary photography with his first recording of an actual street.  June Street, Salford captured modest homes in a terraced street in the north of England.  This was intended to be seen as a real life Coronation Street (a long running English TV soap, set in Manchester) and was very much evidence of an increasingly conceptual edge to his work.  After this, he recorded various communities and traditions, photographing ways of life which were soon to disappear.  From Calderdale to a Halifax rugby stand to a Queens jubilee tea in the rain and the rapidly diminishing congregation of a Hebden Bridge Chapel.

Cartier Bresson described him as being from "a different solar system." MP is also responsible for the droll collections of 'boring' postcards, now up to 3 books -they have practically become a franchise. Parr has a 'whim of iron' as Powell said of Betjeman.One prominent dealer says of Parr '[his] influence in contemporary British photography is unparalleled, but it is his contribution to the understanding and importance of photographic literature that may be his most profound legacy.

✤ Parr says he was trying “to show the traditional aspects of working-class life in a lyrical way”, in the style of the photorealists of the 1930s whose pictures of life in the north of England during the Depression era, the Mass Observation project, he calls “truly inspirational, and the reason why I went north”. Like them, he shot only in black and white – the approved format back then for any serious photographer.

✤ If you ever see this book for less than £200, buy it, as its extremely rare!

Bad Weather(1982)

A Fair Day (1984)Photographs from the West of Ireland

These images of the west of Ireland show a culture caught between a Celtic past and the Great American Dream. A book of conflicting images which juxtaposes picturesque views and scenarios with images of dingier particulars, including an interesting study of abandoned Morris Minor cars.

✤ Parr switched to colour photography in 1984. The resulting work, Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, was published in 1986.It remains hugely controversial, but put the photographer on the world map. This new work presents pictures of new Brighton, continuing in his satirical vein on contemporary life.Since 1994 Parr has been a member of Magnum Photos.

✤ Using bright, saturated colour, he homed in on the screaming kids, listless parents, bad food and piles of rubbish that scarred New Brighton’s polluted, beachless waterfront. The northern working class – the sacred cow of British photojournalism up to this point – had never been less sympathetically portrayed. When these pictures were published, and also shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1986 in an exhibition titled The Last Resort, Parr was widely assumed to be a pitiless Thatcherite, offering up his victims, in the words of one reviewer, as “a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience”.

✤ Twenty-two years later, Parr remains unapologetic.

Politically he says he has always been “classic soft left”

and was a passive supporter of the miners’ strike, which “I

sort of regret not photographing, but you can’t do

everything, right?”. He attributes his change of direction to

aesthetic imperatives. “I thought my previous photographs

looked dowdy, and that if I was trying to document over-

the-top holiday scenes, I needed to use colour. And when

I made the move, it changed my tune. I suppose I started

to make a critique of society as it is, rather than a

celebration of what it used to be. I was showing how our

once-great society is falling apart.”

✤ He says he thinks of himself as “a

quintessentially British photographer,

fascinated by comedy and irony”, implying

there are hundreds of others out there like

him, which there plainly aren’t. “I just choose

what I think are the right things to look at in

light of what’s happening in the world today,

whether it’s the food we eat, the shops we

go to, or the tourist locations we visit.”

✤Seen by many as a negative

comment on working class

holidays, this series was really a

study of what people have to put

up with in run down areas and was

the beginning of his studies of the

English as a nation. 

✤ This was Parr’s next step and focused on the English middle classes in the South West of the country.  Remorseless and unforgiving, his images of the anxiously upwardly mobile is a classic portrait of a small section of the British people at home.

The Cost of Living (1989)

One Day Trip (1989)

✤ Martin followed a bus load of shoppers on a day trip to French hypermarkets across the channel.  Biting and with a sense of revulsion these images are certainly not something the British can be proud of as scenes of incredible greed, waste and litter are graphically shown!

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✤ These people look even more hopeless than

the crowd at New Brighton, but Parr says

what interested him about them was “their

vulnerability, which is what I always look for in

my work, because it’s the antidote to

propaganda. Vulnerability and propaganda

don’t go together”.

✤ totally fearless… the greatest observer of people this country

has ever produced”. but he has been dismissed him as “a

gratuitously cruel social critic who sneers at foibles and

pretensions”. The most widely voiced objection to Parr’s work

complains that it adopts a stance of condescension towards

its subject matter. It was this view that obstructed his election

to membership of the elite photographic co-operative

Magnum. Described by its co-founder, Cartier-Bresson, as “a

community of thought” reflecting “a curiosity about what is

going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a

desire to transcribe it visually”, Magnum argued for six years

over the admission of Parr to its ranks.

John Hinde

✤ Besides being a photographer, Parr is a keen collector of postcards, photographs and various other items and many of his collections have been used as the basis for publications. Since the 1970s, Parr has collected and publicised the garish postcards made between the 1950s and 1970s by John Hinde and his team of photographers. The images made by Hinde and his team are a key influence on Parr's colour photography.

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✤ According to the photographer Brian

Griffin, a friend of Parr’s since their days

together as students at Manchester

Polytechnic in the early 1970s, “Martin isn’t

what I would call technically adept. But

what he has is an incredibly perceptive

eye. When you walk down the street with

Martin, he notices everything.”

✤ His standing as a social documentary photographer is now accepted without question though previously his style was thought intrusive.

✤ Parr's approach to documentary photography is intimate, anthropological and satirical. Macro lenses, ring flash and high-saturation colour film allow him to put his subjects "under the microscope" in their own environment, giving them space to expose their lives and values in ways that often involve inadvertent humour

✤ Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation's Tastes. (1992),

✤ Parr entered ordinary people's homes and took pictures of the mundane aspects of his hosts' lives, combining the images with quotes from his subjects to bring viewers uncomfortably close to them. There was a also a BBC documentary made.

✤ The result of Parr's technique has been said to leave viewers with ambiguous emotional reactions, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

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Common Sense(1996)

✤ Parr is an avid collector, of postcards, trays, even watches. This obsessive nature is also displayed in some of the compositions of his photos.

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http://www.martinparr.com/index1.html

Parr’s recent work has been to document the super rich & he has been working further a field, still offering his intimate stance on peoples lives & leisure habits.

For me it’s the ‘Britishness’ of his work that appeals. The elevation of the ordinary & the commentary this provokes about our habits and aspirations in the 21st century.