I Am Martin Parr (2024)

Parr's photos remind me of punk: they are hard realistic – without embellishment, without making things beautiful but also without making them ugly – and implicitly socially critical because they show contemporary society as it is, which is often not a pretty picture, for example when he photographs mass consumption. But they are also funny because reality is simply absurd and people are strange creatures. The documentary mainly tells the story – embellished by the always charming artist Greyson Perry – that Parr in 1982 was one of the first art photographers to switch from black and white to color, which at the time was associated with advertisements and hobby snapshots, which encouraged him to immediately let go of all the rules, which is also very punk. That caused a lot of resistance from the 'snobs', but now he is a star. We see him walking around behind a walker, photographing everything that is loose and fixed: it is about that one photo where everything is right to get a beautiful composition so that the photo can become iconic. It makes you want to take pictures yourself (that's punk too).

Translated from Dutch · View original