My last B-Sides post was about the impact Larry Clark, specifically Kids and Tulsa had on my work, and today I am back to talk about another photographer that had a massive effect on my work, but this time much later in life. Most of the photographers who had a profound impact on my work I discovered in my teens — people like Clark, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and maybe more than anyone, Glen Friedman who made me want to pick up a camera in the first place to photograph the local DC punk bands I was going to see every weekend. The early 2000’s Vice aesthetic got me shooting film again in my 20s and had a big impact on my style in my post college life, but as an adult the photographer who has inspired me the most has to be Martin Parr.
It’s not like I wasn’t familiar with Martin Parr, he was a member of Magnum Photography, a collective of photojournalists, that I always imagined one day joining when I was younger. That might sound particularly hilarious if you know my work, but photojournalism is the really in the background of all my work, even my mediocre nudes. Parr’s book Last Resort, a collection of working class UK seaside photography has been in my collection forever. His use of daylight flash is something I have tried so many times, but just never consistently with a fraction of the skill and vision that Parr has. His book Small World, where he turned the tables on tourists by photographing them, has been in the back of my head for years as well. You can run a direct line from a couple photos in that book to my zine Off The Hook. Photographing people taking photos, especially selfies, has long been apart of my work, and I know a lot of that comes from Parr, even if it was mostly subconsciously.
But let’s be honest, my work doesn’t resemble Parr’s. He didn’t inspire my work in the same way that someone like Friedman or Clark did where you can see their work in mine, but he had a huge impact for two reasons. The first might be obvious if you know anything about Parr or read one of the many tributes to him after his death. He was maybe the biggest proponent of photo books as an art form. He literally wrote the book on them. He published so many of his own books, but also had an insane collection of them that he sold towards the end of his life (They are now at the Tate Modern) to found the Parr Foundation that looks after his archive as well as preserving the work of other important UK photographers. I am a massive photo book collector myself and have published many photo books and zines and I have no idea what any of that would look like without Parr.
And finally we get to maybe the thing he did that most impacted my work, in a way that maybe no one has noticed because it happened so recently, but it just was exactly what I needed. In 2021 Parr released a book with the Anonymous Project called called Deja View. I was already a huge fan of the Anonymous Project, a massive collection of found photography, and at the time I was working with a group of people on a project digitizing found slide film called, Carousel Curated. Parr started pulling photos from his own photography library and matching his own work to found images from the Anonymous Project collection, creating a series of diptychs that made up the book. The images and the connections are so good and feel so effortless, although I know how time consuming it must have been.
When you make books, you think about work in diptychs because you need to find images that work together on opposite pages. It’s honestly one of my favorite parts of making a book and I bet Parr feels the same way. Trying elevate my mediocre work by grouping images together to make something interesting has long been part of my process, my 2014 book Dinner With Igor is the prime example, but ever since flipping through Deja View I have sort of been obsessed with making diptychs out of my work. Now instead of taking a bunch of related images and then trying to find photos that work together after the edit, I have started thinking about the pairs first. It’s a small shift, and maybe not such an obvious one but it’s something I have been thinking about nearly every day for four years.
A about a year after the book came out I did a thread of my images vs Carousel Curated images that I loved. It’s probably the last good thing I did on Twitter before that site became unusable. I recently had a bunch of portraits in an art show here in Wilmington, NC where I showed them all as diptychs. I have also been working on a zine called Vanity that is a collection of license plates with images that work with those plates in obvious and not so obvious ways. I am actually quite excited about that one as it’s a split zine with my fiance. But on top of all that, it’s really just the way I think about images now. I have started taking photos specifically because I could see how they might pair with an image I shot years ago. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but I can’t tell you how much of an impact that book has had on the way I think about my images past and future.
So to honor Martin Parr, I pulled a bunch of his images and paired them with images of mine that hopefully work together. His work is so much stronger than mine that I am not sure this is doing either of us justice, but I had to do it. Thank you so much for everything Martin, you are going to be inspiring photographers for generations.
