Martin Parr, photographer of tourism and everyday life, dies at 73

BarcelonaBritish photographer Martin Parr (Epsom, 1952), author of more than a hundred photobooks and a member of the Magnum agency, died this Saturday at the age of 73, as announced on social media by the foundation that bears his name. Considered one of the most important documentary photographers of the last 50 years, Parr possessed a remarkable narrative ability, capturing the reality around him with lucidity and irony through his camera lens. He had been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994, and served as its president from 2013 to 2017.

Parr took his first photographs when he was nine years old with a camera given to him by his grandfather, a photography enthusiast. By the age of fourteen, he had already begun to explore documentary photography, and in 1970 he enrolled at Manchester Polytechnic for further training. He graduated in 1973 and began photographing the textile towns of Hebden Bridge and Calderdale, documenting a way of life that was beginning to disappear.

Along these lines, one of his first photographic projects was The NonconformistsIn this series, he portrayed the daily lives of textile factory workers, coal miners, mountain farmers, and pigeon breeders. The photographer conceived these images with Susie Mitchell, whom he married in 1980, and in 2014 They were exhibited at La VirreinaIn Barcelona, ​​with the aim of showcasing the beginnings of an artist who, at that time, already had a long and distinguished career.

Pioneer of color photography

Parr's early photographs were in black and white, until in 1982 he decided to start working in color. It was a risky decision: at the time, no one was doing it, because serious photography was considered to be in black and white. The artistic choice proved successful when, in the mid-1980s, Parr published The last resort, a series of images taken between 1982 and 1985 that immortalized the working class on the beaches near New Brighton. With this work, Parr marked a turning point in photography, both in formal terms—by publishing them in color—and also by focusing on a reality that until then no one had considered worth immortalizing.

In the following years, the photographer turned his attention to the middle class (The cost of living, 1987-1989), in mass tourism (Small world, 1987-1994) and in consumerism (Common sin(1995-1999). These are the fundamental axes that would mark all his work, permeated by a profound yet brilliant view of the reality that surrounded him. "We have a mythologized idea of tourist destinations, and when you arrive it's something else entirely. I try to portray that distance," Parr said. in an interview with theNOW Balearic Islands in 2019, in which he cited Barcelona as an example of a place where "tourism has gone crazy and angered the residents."

From the 1990s onward, the photographer dedicated himself to traveling the world to photograph tourists. Santiago de Compostela, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Acropolis of Athens, Shanghai, the Sphinx of Giza, Venice, the artificial canals of Las Vegas, the Grand Palace of Bangkok, Bethlehem, and Paris are some of the places he captured with his camera.

Parr's photographs, saturated with vibrant colors and devoid of any darkness, demonstrate that between tourism and kitsch There are unbreakable bonds. Moreover, they are forged with wit and irony, because Parr positioned himself at the opposite extreme from the heroic language of social photography. The photographer, in fact, defined himself as "populist," understanding the term to refer to "what people might like, what is popular." Parr could not have been further from the elitist gaze of photography, and he always defended his vision whenever he could. "My priority is to make interesting images. I don't want boring images," he said. Besides being a photographer, Parr was an avid collector. For years he dedicated himself to scouring flea markets in the United States, searching for press photographs of celebrities with annotations about framing and discarded fragments that revealed the role of newspaper editors and quirks such as, for example, removing Yoko Ono from images where John Lennon appeared.

Throughout his life, Parr visited Barcelona on several occasions, which he took advantage of to photograph it. On one of his trips to the Catalan capital in 1994, the photographer captured its most touristic spots—from the Sagrada Família to Parc Güell, Camp Nou, and La Rambla—in a demonstration that in 2012 he She exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB). That exhibition also included some photographic works about Barcelona and tourism that Parr created specifically for the show. The photographer concluded that, in the age of the iPhone, travel photography has ended up replacing the travel experience itself. The last time Parr visited Barcelona was exactly a year ago, as part of the Fujikina festival, which took place at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, where he reviewed his career.