Martin Parr is a british documentary photographer. He is well known for his 'up close and personal' work, as well as being a member of Magnum Photos. He is still alive today [looking up his date of birth, he's younger then my dad!], but the newst photograph I could find of him was taken in Rennes in 2010. It is shown below
Taken from his Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Parr
Martin Parr isn't just known for his photography however, he is also known for his mass amount of books. 'Boring Postcards [1999]' 'Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation's Tastes [1992]' and 'Saddam Hussein Watches [2004]' to name a few of them. Some of them do not contain his work at all, Boring Postcards being an example of this, which is literally full of what it says on the cover. There are two versions of this book, a UK version and 'Boring Postcards USA' which came out a year later.
Overall, he has published almost 50 books and has been featured in around 80 exhibitions worldwide. It's a bit of an understatement to say that he isn't well known.
Parr was one of the few photographers that I looked at in college and thought 'I like that'. There isn't many of them, trust me, but his work just made me realise how something so simple could be so brillient. Back then, I thought to be a good photographer I had to have the most expensive camera on the market, I had to have at least 10 interchangeable lenses and a ton of studio equipment, I also had to be very tech savvy and take images that people wanted to see. But he made me feel different, looking at some of his work made me realise that pictures didn't have to be full of colour of pretty things or beautiful landscapes, they could be of anything, so long as they have purpose and meaning to why said image was taken.
Someday, I would like to be like Parr, or at least, be one of the postcards he publishes in a new book.
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