Martin Parr Research Paper

Martin Parr
38104495800Over the years many photographers have documented the places where they live. Few have stood out from the rest by capturing the country, and the things that make that country unique making us question the society we live in, laugh at it, and remember the reasons we love it all at once. Martin Parr is a British photojournalist. He documented Britain and the British in a way that made us laugh at ourselves, and remember all the things that make us love the country we come from. Not only did Martin Parr capture perfectly the essence of 1980’s-90’s Britain he also taught us how to laugh at ourselves. He started as a photo journalist documenting Britain in black and white, but doing it in a way that was slightly odd, and
He scrapped in by 1 vote, this was the most controversial entry there had ever been. (Telegraph, 2004) Many of the more conservative members at Magnum didn’t agree with Parr joining. In 1995, the year after Parr joined Magnum he had a spat with Henri Cartier-Bresson, when Cartier-Bresson attended Parr’s ‘Small World’ exhibition he told Parr he “was from another planet” (Thomas Weski, July 2012) Parr was still being heavily criticised by the Middle classes, who believed that Parr was “a gratuitously cruel social critic who has made large amounts of money by sneering at the foibles and pretensions of other people” (Telegraph, 2012) however, Parr saw himself as a ‘messenger’ in retort to Cartier-Bresson’s claim he was from another planet, Parr replied with “why shoot the messenger?” When Parr published ‘The Last Resort’ he had argued that he wasn’t mocking the working classes, he was mocking Thatcherism. It is important to remember when we study Parr’s work that he was born in 1952, and brought up in a bungalow in Surrey, Parr is a perfect example of a stereo-typical English Middle-Class man. The people he is constantly accused of mocking are people who are exactly like himself. When you study Parr’s work with this in mind it is much easier to understand that these pictures have a real sense of nostalgia, of the good times we share with one another, rather than being a bright, gaudy, grotesque sneer at the people of
As a boy growing up in Surrey surrounded by the plain and the boring, he had started to document it, to show us the everyday. When Parr moved into colour, and started photographing the working class holidaymakers of New Brighton he faced heavy criticism from all angles saying that he was “a gratuitously cruel social critic who has made large amounts of money by sneering at the foibles and pretensions of other people.” It is easy to see in his work how this might be the case, and how it would be easy to say that Parr was simply sneering at the working classes, and making a lot of money for it, but he tried to explain it was Thatcherism he was knocking, and not working class Britain. In an attempt to prove this Parr decided to photograph the Middle-classes, the people from the same social stance he grew up in. But this only lead to more anger towards him, saying that he was simply mocking the British people. Parr began to remove the faces of the people from the photographs; he began focusing on the other things that made them who they are. He fought his way to become a member of Magnum, but this did little to help many people, particularly other photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s perception of him. When Parr published ‘Common Sense’ it was obvious he had found his niche, by commenting on people, and carrying out his social documentary, in such a way that