Using a palette of bright and clear colors, with subjects close to the camera, Marin Parr photographed the world as he saw it. Often with a large dose of humor.
"Life is funny. I try to capture that in my pictures," he said in an interview with The Guardian in February.
He was still active at the time and said that he was constantly looking for new motifs to immortalize, while at the age of 72 he was working full-time on his large archive and fighting cancer.
Changed the photo
Martin Parr, who was born in Surrey in southern England in 1952, made a big splash in the mid-1980s with an exhibition of photos of ordinary sunbathers in a run-down holiday resort outside Liverpool.
His style helped change documentary photography from the serious, black-and-white images of earlier times to greater playfulness in full color.
The colors take (the images) a step away from reality. I guess that's part of my vision, even if it sounds pretentious. And humor, he himself described his style in The Guardian.
Cape towards consumption
His holiday pictures are still among his best-known, but he has also depicted Russia, North Korea, the British miners' strike of 1984–85, wealthy Britons during Margaret Thatcher's years in power, and holidaymakers in many places around the world, images that have made Parr one of the world's most celebrated photographers.
He often had a penchant for consumerism, or as he himself put it:
I take serious photographs disguised as entertainment.
Parr was also associated with the prestigious photo agency Magnum. His work, which has often been compared to that of the Swede Lars Tunbjörk, has been exhibited several times in Sweden. A documentary about his life and work is currently being shown on SVT Play.
