In memory of Martin Parr
- Ali Taptık
- 9 dakika önce
- 7 dakikada okunur
Following Martin Parr’s passing, we look again at his gaze toward the ordinary and his use of humor in photography
Words: Ali Taptık
Martin Parr, Photo: Ekin Özbiçer, from the series shot for the July 2017 issue of Harper’s Bazaar
On 6 December 2025, British photographer Martin Parr, a member of Magnum Photos and one of the most important cooperative photo agencies in the photographic field, passed away at his home in Bristol at the age of 73. Known for his humor, what made Parr truly singular in my eyes was his ability to approach irony with compassion, along with his inexhaustible curiosity about people and his generosity. Please do not find it off-putting that I refer to myself in this text of remembrance, as I have lost a mentor who offered me significant support, both materially and morally.
You may or may not agree with me, but I believe that learning many forms of art and craft often begins with imitation. Parr was among the first figures I tried to emulate. At a time of dial up internet connections, it was nearly impossible to find substantial content beyond Magnum Photos’ own website. I am referring to a photographic universe very different from the one we inhabit today. Martin Parr’s way of looking from Europe to Europe, at Western societies, or what we would now call the Global North, had a strong influence on me. Immersed in his tourism themed works, I began skipping school and photographing tourists in Sultanahmet Square, just outside my high school. Over the years, I can say that very few photographers have touched my career as directly and as organically as he did.
Martin Parr, Photo: Ekin Özbiçer, from the series shot for the July 2017 issue of Harper’s Bazaar
Parr was born in 1952 in Epsom, Surrey, and his interest in photography was encouraged by his grandfather, George Parr. He took his first photograph at the age of eleven, a portrait of his father standing on a frozen stream. “At thirteen or fourteen, I wanted to be a photographer. There was never going to be anything else,” he later recalled. In 1970, he began studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University, and graduated in 1973. One of his earliest completed projects was a black and white documentation of Prestwich Mental Hospital in 1972. He was not alone in finding his way, in one form or another, into a psychiatric institution as a subject. Other early works include June Street (1972), produced with Daniel Meadows, and Butlin’s by the Sea (1971). In 1975, Parr moved to Hebden Bridge, where he photographed farming and church communities. These early bodies of work are predominantly black and white, and far removed from the images for which he later became widely known.
In 1980, Parr moved to the west of Ireland, where he photographed abandoned Morris Minor cars scattered across the rural landscape and the new bungalows replacing traditional houses. It can be said that the social commentary in his photographs sharpened within this conflicted region. In 1982, while Margaret Thatcher was still at an early stage of her political career, he returned to England and began working in color. Parr has written about the influence of color photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore on his practice. This shift was crucial, as aside from the more documentary driven approach of Meyerowitz, Eggleston and Shore were also distinguished by their conceptual sensibilities. Although Parr is often described as a documentary photographer, the conceptual depth of his work can be traced back to these influences.
Martin Parr, from The Last Resort series, New Brighton, England. 1983-85. © Martin Parr | Magnum Photos
One of his best known bodies of work from the 1980s is The Last Resort (1983-1985), which offers a sharply ironic view of England. Photographed with flash and highly saturated colors along the New Brighton seaside in Liverpool Bay, the series marked Parr’s international breakthrough and documented working class life during the Thatcher era. It was followed by projects such as The Cost of Living (1987-1989) and One Day Trip (1988). Although firmly rooted in the 1980s, the photograph of a woman sunbathing beside a construction excavator feels, to me, somehow timeless.
From this point on, it becomes possible to follow a photographic practice that branches out in multiple directions. The tourism series he would continue for many years can be seen as an extension of the sensibility already present in The Last Resort. At the same time, projects such as the photographs of the town of Boring, or series like Bored Couples, carried a critical stance toward photography’s claim to reality while also operating as tightly focused conceptual projects.
Left: Martin Parr, Tenby, Wales (from Small World series), 2011. © Martin Parr | Magnum Photos
Right: Martin Parr, Mumbai, India, 2017. © Martin Parr | Magnum Photos
During the 1990s, he published books such as Home and Abroad (1993), Small World (1995-1999), Japonais Endormis (1998), and Common Sense (1995-1999). The exhibition Common Sense entered the Guinness World Records when it was shown simultaneously in 41 galleries worldwide on 1 April 1999. Over the course of his life, Parr published more than 100 photobooks, edited around 30 others, and, together with Gerry Badger, produced the three volume series The Photobook: A History (2004-2014), all of which form essential parts of this broader narrative.
Between 2004 and 2012, Parr served as a professor at the University of Wales Newport. In 2017, he founded the Martin Parr Foundation with the aim of supporting emerging, established, and overlooked photographers working in and around Britain and Ireland. To date, the foundation has hosted 34 exhibitions, organizes the annual Books on Photography (BOP) festival, and awards grants to photographers who have historically been underrepresented.
Parr served as president of Magnum Photos between 2013 and 2017. During his presidency, he came to Istanbul at the invitation of Mavi Jeans to produce a book titled Şimdiki İstanbul'da Ustalar. At the book launch, I was invited to conduct the public talk and asked him about his relationship with Philip Jones Griffiths and his path into Magnum. Because I was more excited than he was, he teased me generously, and thankfully we were able to wrap things up quickly without exhausting the audience and move on to the cocktail reception. Parr was, in fact, almost not admitted to Magnum at all. His use of humor as a central tool was considered by some to be too vulgar and childish. He became an associate member in 1988 and was accepted as a full member in 1994 following a controversial vote decided by a single ballot. Henri Cartier-Bresson once remarked that he and Parr belonged to “two different solar systems.” A comparable figure would later emerge in Antoine d’Agata in 2005.
This was not, in fact, the first book he produced in Istanbul. An earlier publication, which I had the opportunity to examine in detail at Manifold, is among the most sought after items in his collections. As with the later book, its design by Esen Karol, together with its blending of street scenes and a deliberately “produced” fashion aesthetic, gave Istanbul’s clichés a distinctly Parr like treatment, or at times a deliberately straightforward gaze, making the publication an especially compelling photobook.
Left: Martin Parr, The Parthenon, Athens, 1996. © Martin Parr | Magnum Photos
Right: Martin Parr, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2010. © Martin Parr | Magnum Photos
The 1999 documentary Contacts remains one of the key documents in the history of photography, as it allows photographers to speak candidly about their contact sheets, working methods, and worldviews. It was there that I first encountered Parr’s black and white documentary work on small churches in central England and the congregations surrounding them. Visually, these photographs are somewhat more rigid, yet they carry an equally powerful sense of humor. It is here that his critical, gently mocking, yet ultimately compassionate gaze toward the middle class to which he himself belonged begins to take shape. In Parr’s photography, no one made to look ridiculous is rendered resentful. He himself would laugh along. Perhaps part of what makes these images so funny is that they depict situations we have all fallen into, or easily could.
Parr also realized remarkably ambitious projects within the field of curating, working across very different scales. One of the most widely known is Boring Postcards, a project through which it becomes possible to trace how visual perception is formed, based on an archive of postcards that were genuinely produced and circulated. Another much loved project, one that has resurfaced repeatedly in recent days, is his series of self portraits made through studio photographers. What touched me most, however, was his curatorial work around exhibitions and photobooks. When I first went to Arles in 2005, Parr was one of the curators, and it was through his invitation that I encountered Rinko Kawauchi’s exhibition and book, both of which left a lasting impression on me and led me to begin working in color and with a medium format camera. While Parr continued to curate in other festivals and contexts, the three volume The Photobook: A History, produced with Gerry Badger, offered an early and bold mapping of one of the most concentrated subfields of contemporary photography, namely the photobook itself. Parr came across my own book in Marseille and included it in the third volume. Our personal acquaintance began with a brief two line email from him and later extended to a warm rakı table in Istanbul.
Parr’s humor remained compassionate because he did not seek out the bizarre, but rather the moments we all find ourselves in. His move to color photography was, in itself, a clear position. At a time when a settled and still dominant documentary tradition prevailed, he produced images that stayed closer to everyday culture. His curatorial work and the initiatives of the foundation reflected a similar generosity, foregrounding plurality in photography by making space for other perspectives rather than imposing his own. The Photobook: A History, produced with Gerry Badger, became an essential point of entry for researchers and a foundational reference for practitioners. In my view, anyone interested in making photobooks should begin by engaging with these volumes. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s remark about “two different solar systems” pointed precisely to this tension, between the monumental and the everyday. Parr stood firmly on the side of the everyday, and in doing so, showed that it too is worthy of attention.
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