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Out of context: Reply #76546
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- Horp8
It's going to be an unpopular hot take but...
I don't much like Martin Parr's photography; at least not consistently or fully enough for me to think of him as a great photographer.
He has taken some shots that really wowed me back in my art college days, but even then there were plenty of others who had taken equal and even greater candid street shots.
I've always found him to be, on the whole, a bit sneering and critical of other people's lives. He points his camera to say "look how crude, how basic, how easily satiated these poor people are".
Then there are the minor scandals across the decades that seemed to get brushed under the carpet.
The first was when subjects of his pictures allegedly came forward to say he had carefully contrived the scenes he'd shot... he asked them to volunteer and told them what to do, how to stand, how to behave. Yet the images were then passed off as spontaneous candid moments, caught by a photographer with a keen instinct for the decisive moment.
There were the smattering of alleged accusations of racist intent which came a little later, but then seemed to be scrubbed, possibly by PR and injunction to protect the value of his archive... I don't know.
But also, and this isn't his fault I know... he inspired a plague of Parr-esque aspiring street photographers, who assembled in such monumental numbers to take very shit photographs of fat people with ice creams that it became a permanent mutation of what street photography can be. It curdled a once full spectrum thing into being either Parr-like, or not Parr-like, with the democratics of opinion leaning towards the notion that if it isn't Parr-like then it isn't street photography and is therefore shit...
"This picture is a bit boring... where are the varicose veins and the little dog pissing up the NO DOGS sign?"
He did take some really great shots, but he also took an ocean of mediocre ones, and for me there's just enough of a whiff of contempt and mischevious cruelty that I don't feel that I will mourn the passing of a great creative genius today.
*takes a cheeky shit on his compendium*
- who?NBQ00
- NBQpango
- Nothing I would disagree with there.mort_
- popular take so far :)Gnash
- All art is staged.hellrod
- Some disagreement here. Never felt any sneer or judgement in his work, always a celebration. Home for me was seaside Yorkshire, so it was relatable.MrT
- https://www.theguard…
Martin Parr obituaryMorning_star - Find it hard to believe some of his photos were not staged, especially with larger amounts of people.letterhead
- it's hard enough to art direct 5+ people in a specific scene and get a single shot that doesn't need retouching. In my experience.letterhead
- Don't get me wrong, I don't hate his work, I just don't think it's as consistently remarkable as other people do.Horp
- Interesting obituary. Seems he had love for the north of England rather than a critical eye.mort_
- The documentary's worth a watch too - only released in the last year.MrT
- 1. Wait he died?
2. The sneer was kind of the point. Gross colors, gross food / subjects. His photography always came across as staged like a LaChapelle..garbage - ..about poor folks.garbage
- 3. Do people really consider him a street photographer? It's such a dumb designation, but photographers are morons so maybe they do.garbage