Photographer Martin Parr On 50 Years Behind the Lens

Legendary photographer Martin Parr has been accused of snobbery for his fly-on-the-wall documentary shots. But he’s just keeping it real, he tells Bazaar Arabia

Why should anyone see the forthcoming documentary I Am Martin Parr? Martin Parr ponders the question. “Well, you get to see me in action, which isn’t something anyone normally sees,” he says. “And you find out what a nice guy I am – which is probably a surprise to people. Some people think that my pictures can be mean.”

Martin – the documentary photographer and a recent inductee to the International Photography Hall of Fame, has won a reputation for his full-colour, fly-on-the-wall shots of people at social events, from a gathering at the litter-strewn British seaside to top-hatted toffs at the races, from Milan to Dubai but, especially, around his native UK. Some accuse him of snobbery. Others see his photographs as conveying everyday life in all its messy, fascinating glory.

“I don’t understand why it’s sometimes said that my pictures are controversial,” says Martin, now 72. “I define my relationship to the world out there as I see it rather than as things could be seen. It’s very simple for me but some people find that uncomfortable perhaps. You go to a war zone or famine [and shoot that] it’s not considered controversial, but shooting people in a supermarket somehow is. [But] in the end [that controversy] hasn’t done me any harm.”

Quite the opposite – Martin is a cult figure for many. At the recent annual Fuji film Fujikino photography event in Barcelona, where he was guest speaker, long queues formed to buy his books and fans requested selfies – a little ironically given Martin’s book, Selfies, perhaps implicitly suggests his mild disapproval of the practice. The fashion industry loves him too. Martin shoots for the likes of Gucci, Paul Smith and former Bazaar Arabia cover star, Amina Muaddi.

“I try to take my photos with a strong sense of design, which people in fashion like, but they also like me because I’m trying to keep it real, which is getting away from the fantasy of fashion. That’s a trend of the past few years that I’ve benefited from,” explains Martin – and not least financially. He likes shooting fashion because it helps pay for the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, an archive of what he considers to be overlooked British photography. “People want me to take ‘Martin Parr’ pictures, which is good, because that’s all I can take. I think [my fashion pictures] are slightly subversive of fashion but they don’t seem to have spotted that.”

Indeed, for all that Martin claims not to understand how his often humorous, knowing photographs can cause a fuss, he concedes that he aims for them to “provide laughter and discomfort at the same time.”

“I guess I think of them as critiques. They’re political, but only in an absurd way, a refl ection perhaps of the strange relationship I have to the UK. I love it and hate it at the same time and those contradictions are interesting to me.”

After 50 years behind the lens, Martin’s fascination for photography remains undimmed, notably our increasingly uneasy relationship to it as the arbiter of truth, but also its oddities. “There are a lot of strange customs in photography. When you go to a wedding you take photos and when you go to a funeral you don’t,” he laughs. “When you have a family album of photos, everyone is always smiling despite any dysfunctionality within that family. But we all know photography is not the medium for truth and never was.”

He shoots every week, and is always thinking of events he’d like to turn his socially observant eye to. Maybe he needs to: his quality control is intense. If, at the end of a year, he has 10 or so pictures he’s satisfied with, he counts that a success. “Of course I can’t define what makes certain pictures the keepers – you just know it when you see it,” he chuckles. “It’s intuitive. If you go out thinking you’re only going to take keepers you won’t get anywhere. You have to stay with the momentum to capture the scene in front of you. You have to keep working at it.”

I Am Martin Parr is set to be released 21 February 2025. His first autobiography Utterly Lazy and Inattentive is scheduled for September 2025.

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s February 2025 issue