British photographer Martin Parr, known for his sardonic, candy-colored portraits of everyday life, died at 73 on December 6th. The Martin Parr Foundation announced that the artist died at his home in Bristol. The artist was diagnosed with myeloma (a bone marrow cancer), although The Guardian reported he was in remission earlier this year.
Parr was celebrated for his sharp and often humorous photographs that turned mundane scenes—holidays, kitschy pubs, crowded beaches—into incisive commentaries on culture and consumerism. His work, at once intimate and unflinching, captured the quirks of modern British life with both satire and empathy.
Born in Surrey, England in 1952, Parr began photographing early in his life and studied at Manchester Polytechnic, graduating in 1973. After documenting chapel-going communities in Hebden Bridge in 1975, he moved to Ireland in 1980. In 1982, he published his first book, Bad Weather—a series of flash-lit, rain-soaked scenes from northern England shot with a waterproof camera. Later that year, he relocated to Wallasey, near Liverpool, to fully embrace color photography.
Once he arrived in England, Parr started what is perhaps the artist’s most famous body of work. His series “The Last Resort” (1983–85) snapped scenes of working-class bathers along New Brighton Beach in Wallasey. These scenes, from the ice cream parlor in The Last Resort [Ice Cream Girl] (1983–85) to the lone sunbather in The Last Resort [Sunbathing] (1983–85), approached everyday life with a seldom-seen-before verve.
Parr was drawn to “low culture” and how it was reflected through tourism because he saw it as a stage in which ordinary people perform their identities—revealing class, hope, aspiration, and social contrast all at once. “Tourism is the biggest industry in the world,” he told The New Yorker in 2010. “I’m interested in the great conundrum, the contradiction between the mythology of these places and the reality. And if you want to photograph people, there’s no better place to go than tourist sites. You just put the honey pot in front of them and go to work.”
Parr eventually worked as a fashion photographer starting in 1999, beginning with the Italian publication Amica. Throughout his life, he published more than 100 books of photography. He joined Magnum Photos in 1988, eventually being elected as the president of the organization from 2013 to 2017. His work is featured in prestigious collections, from the Tate London to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
