As a new version of Small World and a collection of his fashion work hits the bookshelves, Martin Parr talks to Tracy Calder about how obsession and a desire to connect have shaped his career
Martin Parr, by his own admission, takes a lot of bad pictures. I once heard him say that if he gets ten great shots a year then he’s happy. ‘Taking a good picture is so rare,’ he says, chatting to me from his sofa at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. ‘There’s always a chance that a good picture is waiting around the corner, but most of the time it’s not. I take a lot of bad pictures in order to understand the good.’
With more than four decades of experience behind him – including four years as president of Magnum Photos – Parr knows when he’s onto something good. ‘There’s an excitement, a sort of inkling when you’re taking it,’ he says, ‘it sort of drives you forward.’
Parr grew up in suburban Surrey, a place he found ‘quite dreary’. Every weekend he was forced to visit the local sewage works with his father, a keen birdwatcher, who used the site to locate and ring birds. To relieve the boredom, Parr took up trainspotting.
‘My father was obsessed with birdwatching in the same way that I’m obsessed with photography,’ he says. ‘There are plenty of things that I inherited from my grandfather and father.’
In fact, it was his grandfather, George, who encouraged Parr to take up photography. George lived in Yorkshire and when his teenage grandson came to visit during the summer holidays they would shoot, process and print film together. At the age of 13, Parr announced he was going to become a photographer. According to an interview for It’s Nice That (September 2019), he proclaimed, ‘It’s what I will do for the rest of my life, until I drop dead.’
Collecting clearly runs in the family. Aside from birds and trains, young Parr created a natural history museum in the cellar of the family home, displaying bird pellets, skulls and dead moles for all to see. His urge to collect ephemera found an outlet in stamps and coins before transferring to postcards, prints and photobooks. One of his more unusual collections is a fine selection of watches featuring Saddam Hussein’s face.
This obsessive aspect of his personality has served him well throughout his career – Parr tends to focus on photo series, mining a subject until he hits a seam of gold. Between 1983 and 1985, for example, he photographed the Liverpool beach resort of New Brighton.
Ice-cream sellers, litter-strewn paths and screaming babies were all subjected to the Parr treatment – namely the use of overly-saturated colour, on-board flash, and
