Artist Focus | Martin Parr

 

When first given the brief for the project, one of the poignant artists to take a look at was Martin Parr, who is a British photographer who primarily documents people living their natural day to day life.

Parr takes an ordinary thing, such as a day out at the beach, and photographs different groups of people, focusing on how each lives the same day and how their habits and actions differ. I love his collection on 'Cuba On Line' - a collection of photos from Cuba showing everyone being absorbed into their phones and other gadgets which is so relevant of today's society!

 

Looking through his work it's amazing to see how our mannerisms and actions vary depending on age, gender and religion and it's something that I'd be very interested in trying to document this myself throughout my research on Birmingham, given how diverse and multi-cultural the community is! 

I was really drawn to Parr's collection of remote Scottish postbox photographs too. While different from the rest of his work, it's interesting to see the same item that people all over the world use but in different locations. It gave me the idea of possibly picking my own everyday item and documenting it across the city of Birmingham through a series of photographs that I could develop into samples in the workshops. 

*photos taken from https://www.martinparr.com/