MARTIN PARR

IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST AND CURATOR RAVI AGARWAL

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Ravi Agarwal: You have such a huge body of work. You have a life of photography, it’s really hard to think of things and you have been very open, I have been reading up on the website, reading your interviews. You’ve always been extremely candid and that’s a very good resource. Just to begin with if you could briefly tell us about what got you into photography?

Martin Parr: My grandfather, who is a very keen amateur photographer, he lived in the North of England and I was brought up in the South. I would stay with him during the summers and we went out shooting processed film, made prints and by the age of thirteen or fourteen I decided that I wanted to be a photographer. It was a very long time ago, it was in ’67, fifty-three years ago and now I’m a photographer indeed.

RA: I started photographing when I was thirteen and I’m sixty years old now. I was particularly interested in reading about your move away from Pictorialism very early on and you moved into a different kind of space and you also shifted from black and white to colour which was all very radical at the time because photography was and still, in some way, continues to be black and white as serious art photography.

MP: Now, I think now it can be anything. As you said, twenty or thirty years ago, colour was almost a heresy. Although India had very good colour photographers with Raghubir Singh and even with Raghu Rai but particularly Raghubir was pretty ahead of his game.