Martin Parr 1952 - 2025
I met Martin Parr on numerous occasions.
Yesterday I learned that Martin Parr had died at home in Bristol, aged 73, after a long illness. It feels strange even writing that. Martin has been a presence in my photographic life for so long that I’d started to believe he would just always be there, turning up with a camera, finding something funny and unforgiving and absolutely spot-on in the most ordinary corner of Britain.
I was lucky enough to meet Martin several times over the years. The last time I saw him was only a few months ago. He was clearly not in perfect health, but he was sharp, engaged and, honestly, looked to be doing remarkably well considering everything he was dealing with. There was that familiar combination of mischief and precision in the way he spoke. You always got the sense that even as you were chatting, he was still composing pictures in his head.
One of the real privileges of my career was being able to sit down and interview him for The Fujicast. He didn’t need to say yes. He certainly didn’t need to give up his time for me and my microphone. But he did, and he did it graciously, with a dry humour that was very, very “Martin”.
I was also a supporter of the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, and that place has been important to me and many others. I’ve spent happy hours there just wandering, looking at prints, nosing through books and ephemera, and soaking in the sheer breadth of what he cared about. It isn’t just a gallery. It is, for me, a kind of living notebook of British and Irish photography, with Martin’s own obsessions running through it like a spine. To stand in those rooms is to be reminded that photography is at its best when it is curious, awkward, a bit funny, and absolutely serious all at the same time.
Martin’s influence on me is enormous. I don’t say that in the casual, Instagram-caption way. When I first really encountered his work, it reaffirmed something in my head about what documentary photography could be.
From those early pictures in and around Hebden Bridge, working with rural chapel communities, through to the explosion of colour and chaos in The Last Resort, he showed that you could be both critical and affectionate in the same frame.
I Am Martin Parr is a feature length documentary currently available on BBC iPlayer
He gave permission – not directly, but through the work – to point your camera at the “unimportant” stuff. The bad food. The funny expressions. The slightly shabby details that most people would tidy away before inviting the photographer in. He showed that those things are the story.
As a wedding photographer for many years, I’ve always talked about light, composition and moment, but running underneath that is something I owe to Martin: an insistence that real life is enough. You don’t need to beautify or flatter it into something else. You need to see it clearly, and then be honest about what you’ve seen. His pictures taught me that a photograph doesn’t have to be polite to be humane.
Martin’s work has been described in all sorts of ways over the years: satirical, cruel, affectionate, anthropological. Some of that debate will carry on forever, I imagine. What I know, from the perspective of someone who has spent a lot of time looking at photographs and a lot of time with families in ordinary situations, is that he understood people.
He understood class, aspiration, boredom, holidays, consumerism, the odd pride we take in our own bad taste. And he managed to pull all of that into pictures that are instantly recognisable as his, but also feel uncomfortably close to home.
The list of photographers who have been shaped by his books and exhibitions is too long to even start. Hebden Bridge, The Last Resort, The Cost of Living, Small World, Common Sense… these are not just titles on my bookshelf; they are part of the vocabulary of contemporary documentary photography now.
I see echoes of his way of looking everywhere, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
I take some comfort in knowing that his archive and legacy are not going to drift. The Martin Parr Foundation exists precisely to safeguard and share that history, and Magnum – the sometimes tempestuous family he joined and eventually helped to steer – has already made clear that it will play its part in preserving and presenting his work.
Together, I’m sure they will wrap their arms around everything he leaves behind and make sure future generations can argue about, be inspired by, and occasionally be offended by Martin’s photographs, just as we have.
But that is the big, public view of things. On a more personal level, I will miss simply knowing he is out there, somewhere in Britain, still pointing a camera at something that most of us would walk past. I will miss the thought that there might be a new book coming, a new exhibition, another sharp little observation about who we are and what we’ve become.
For what it is worth, I’m deeply grateful. Grateful that he let me into his world for a short while on the podcast. Grateful for the time spent at the Foundation, for the prints and the books and the sense that photography in this country matters. Grateful that his work nudged me, years ago, to trust the ordinary moments in front of me.
Martin Parr has gone, but the way he taught us to look at the world is not going anywhere.
That way of seeing is now baked into how so many of us work. And every time I raise a camera to photograph a small, unremarkable moment and treat it as if it is important, I know exactly who I am indebted to.
