
Attracting critics as well as fans, including fellow Magnum member Henri Cartier-Bresson, who remains “highly suspicious” of Parr’s photography, he has never flinched from his content, saying of it, “certainly my photographs have a critical bite to them. I knew I was middle-class...." Val Williams is also conscious of that fact in her lively essays that accompany the image selections from Parr's career, following him from the north of England to Ireland, back to the northwest, and then down to Bristol. From his early days taking snaps at Butlin’s to his strongest projects such as The Last Resort, The Cost of Living, and Think of England, he renders his subject curiously denuded, despite frequent heavy adornment. Of similar kitchen-sink, kitschy curiosity as Pulp explore in their so-English music, Parr is less concerned with the "ordinary" than with the life less ordinary, such as holidays or social occasions, at which we exhibit our most excruciating foibles. Interestingly, when he moves outside his native land, as with Small World, his pictures remain technically superb, but they lose the intuitive third dimension that his engrossed Englishness provides when observing his own. Parr may divide the critics at times, but this tasty body of work argues persuasively for his provocative and accomplished take on life, snapped from the inside looking in. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Hardcover : 354 pages
Language: English