MARTIN PARR

Martin Parr is a British photographer who has been working to photograph the ‘quirks of ordinary life’ for more than 30 years. I am interested in the compilation of work from his book Beach Life, 2012, in which Parr has selected beach-themed photographs that he has taken over the last few decades with the intention of documenting beach traditions.

 

In the series, there are photos of sunbathers, swimming trips and picnics in the UK as well as in countries as far apart as China, Argentina and Thailand. I like the esoteric relate-ability of his British work and, as such the contrast this creates between his UK photos and his photos elsewhere. The UK photos feel familiar and sentimental and the foreign photos feel exciting, different and adventurous. It’s interesting that, to a person of these other nationalities, the British photos would feel equally different and exciting to them, as it is his intention that his work will be understood best by people of the culture he is photographing.

 

Parr started out his career shooting in black-and-white, using natural daylight, but in the early 1980s, he switched to shooting in intense, saturated colour with a daylight flash, using a manual camera and ISO50 colour negative film, thereby creating his distinctive style. This style was inspired by the language of commercial photography, where the subject is brightly lit and colours heavily saturated. ​His more modern photos are taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro lens but they still retain the saturated quality of his film work.

 

His British photos use these bright, garish colours to highlight our quirky National behaviours and many have the grainy, old-colour film feel to them, which gives his photos a feeling of nostalgia. The body of work commonly features brightly coloured patriotic British symbols like the UK flag, fish and chips, and other classic things found at a British seaside. West Bay (Seagulls eating chips), 1997, (right) is a classic example of this. It’s a bright, colourful photograph that uses a shallow depth of field to put the camera’s focus point on two seagulls, one watching the camera warily whilst the other upends a familiar polystyrene container of chips. Parr has used a fast shutter speed so that the bird and chips that are in motion but not blurred. There is bunting, the British coastal landscape and the UK flag featuring patriotically, out of focus but clearly recognisable, in the background. Parr has created the Rule of Thirds vertically by positioning the two birds in the left and right thirds with the middle third empty, and by splitting the photo horizontally into three using the horizon line and the brick wall the birds are standing on. The eye is led first to the focal point of the seagull upending the chips, then across the thirds horizontally to the second bird, turning the wall into a leading line. The lighting in the image comes from both the sun and a flash and is bright to emphasise the saturation, cementing the feel of a hot, British summer’s day. The photo uses the Formal Elements in the line of the wall, his use of bright colour, and the patterns of the flags.

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I like that the work creates a narrative and that many of his photos have an irony or sense of humour to them created by their familiarity. A man with funny sunburn lines reminds the viewer of that time Dad got burnt at the beach, and the seagulls with the chips remind us of the time Mum had her chips stolen by gulls. The familiarity is borne from a kind of collective British consciousness of our own similar experiences and this is something I would like to draw on in my own work.

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In my own photography, I also want to replicate Parr's use of bright colours and the grainy look of the old film. I want to take on his use of British and foreign symbolism by using classically British or foreign subjects in my work, to clearly portray the country I am photographing.