The bizarre photographs of Martin Parr

“This is what we look like when we have fun,” these images scream in brightly colored artificiality, as if they had been dipped in candied sugar again. The ruthless documentarian achieved this effect by using flashlight during the day.

You almost get sunburned when you look at them, some of these photographs are so exaggerated. This also meant that Parr’s acceptance into the renowned photo agency “Magnum” in the 1990s was only possible despite resistance. He is said to have said that he would rather go to the supermarket for his work than to the war. From 2013 to 2017, the Brit was even president of “Magnum”.

Parr, born in Epsom, Surrey in 1952, had an incredibly good eye for the painful bizarreness of everyday life, for the banal and vulgar and sometimes the comic. He used an underwater camera to photograph people in bad weather bracing themselves against the wind with wet raincoats. With these observations he explicitly meant himself. Basically, all of his pictures were self-portraits, he said about the recordings.

Satirical portraits of British society

The Berlin exhibition house C/O Berlin wrote that he was the “photographer with the English eye”. Parr himself said that he had applied the national characteristics of the British to his work with mischief and irony.

In the foundation he founded in Bristol, photography relating to Great Britain and Ireland is exhibited and his own work is collected and archived. Most recently, Parr worked to replenish his archive of images about Britain, to which he continually contributed new images. In 2021, Parr was diagnosed with cancer. He died on Sunday at the age of 73.