Martin Parr (23 May 1952–6 December 2025) was an English documentary photographer and photojournalist. He was known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
His major projects were rural communities (1975–1982), The Last Resort (1983–1985), The Cost of Living (1987–1989), Small World (1987–1994) and Common Sense (1995–1999).
Since 1994, Parr had been a member of Magnum Photos. He had around 60 solo photobooks published, and had featured in around 90 exhibitions worldwide – including the international touring exhibition ParrWorld, and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre, London, in 2002.
The Martin Parr Foundation, founded in 2015, and registered as a charity in 2015 opened premises in his hometown of Bristol in 2017. It houses his personal archive, his collection of British and Irish photography by other photographers, and a gallery.
Parr has said of his photography:
The fundamental thing I'm exploring constantly is the difference between the mythology of the place and the reality of it. ... Remember I make serious photographs disguised as entertainment. That's part of my mantra. I make the pictures acceptable to find the audience but deep down there is actually a lot going on that's not sharply written in your face. If you want to read it you can read it.
Parr's aesthetic was close-up, through use of a macro lens, and employing saturated colour, a result of either the type of film and/or use of a ring flash. This allows him to put his subjects "under the microscope" in their own environment, giving them space to expose their lives and values in ways that often involve inadvertent humour. His technique, as seen in his book Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation's Tastes (1992), has been said to leave viewers with ambiguous emotional reactions, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
Manchester Polytechnic, 1970–1973
Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970 to 1973 with contemporaries Daniel Meadows and Brian Griffin. Parr and Meadows collaborated on various projects, including working at Butlin's as roving photographers. They were part of a new wave of documentary photographers, "a loose British grouping, which, though it never gave itself a title have become variously known as 'the Young British Photographers', 'Independent Photographers' and the 'New British Photography'."
Rural communities, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Ireland, 1975–1982
In 1975, Parr moved to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire where he would complete his first mature work. He was involved with the Albert Street Workshop, a hub for artistic activity which included a darkroom and exhibition space. Parr spent five years photographing rural life in the area, focusing on the Methodist (and some Baptist) non-conformist chapels, a focal point for isolated farming communities that in the early 1970s were closing down. He photographed in black-and-white, for its nostalgic nature and for it being appropriate to his celebratory look at this past activity. Also, photographers at that time were obliged to work in black-and-white to be taken seriously, colour being associated with commercial and snapshot photography. His series The Non-Conformists was widely exhibited at the time and published as a book in 2013. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "It's easy to forget how quietly observational Parr was as a black-and-white photographer."
In 1980, Parr married Susan Mitchell and, for her work, they moved to the west coast of Ireland.
Parr's first publications, Bad Weather (1981) published in 1982 by Zwemmer with an Arts Council subsidy, Calderdale Photographs (1984) and A Fair Day: Photographs from the West Coast of Ireland (1984), all featured photographs from mostly northern England, and Ireland, in black-and-white. He used a Leica M3 with a 35mm lens; although for Bad Weather he quickly switched to an underwater camera with a flashgun. Parr also photographed a series of pubs in 1982/83, called Yates Wine Lodge.
The working class, The Last Resort, 1982–1985
In 1982, Parr and his wife moved to Wallasey, England, and he switched permanently to colour photography, inspired by the work of US colour photographers, mostly Joel Meyerowitz, but also William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, and also the British Peter Fraser and Peter Mitchell. Parr has written that "I had also encountered the post cards of John Hinde when I worked at Butlin's in the early 70s and the bright saturated colour of these had a big impact on me."
During the summers of 1983, 1984 and 1985 he photographed working-class people at the seaside in nearby New Brighton. This work was published in the book The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton (1986) and exhibited in Liverpool and London. It was first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1986. For these first colour photographs in 1982 he had bought a Plaubel Makina 67 with a fixed wide-angel lens, a camera, which just recently had entered the British market. Shortly after he began using flashlight (again). He still loved black and white, "but once I moved to colour, I never went back" — except for a few occasions like a trip to India and an invitation to China by its government in 1985, alongside two other photographers, where he took his final photographs in black and white.
Although John Bulmer had pioneered colour documentary photography of Britain, from 1965, In the 2009 reissue of The Last Resort Gerry Badger has emphasised its significance for British photography and Parr's own path: "For both, it represented a seismic change in the basic mode of photographic expression, from monochrome to colour, a fundamental technical change that heralded the development of a new tone in documentary photography." This was underscored by the controversy it inspired, with some critics, upset about the alleged exploitation and exposure of the working class for the photographers' own gain.
Beginning in the early-1980s he also got the chance to exhibit his work outside the UK, and in bigger venues, such as the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (1985), The Last Resort was presented at the Serpentine Galleries, London (1986), an exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany followed the same year, and also a first appearance at the Festival d'Arles. In Japan he had his first solo show in 1988.