Martin Parr

Born in Epsom, Surrey, Martin Parr has studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic (1970-73) and gained early recognition in Europe and abroad as he won three successive awards from the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s.

To support his career as a freelance photographer, he took on various teaching assignments between 1975 and the early 1990s. Then, after much heated debate because of his provocative photographic style, he became a Magnum member in 1994, and his work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States and acquired by a large number of public collections.

In recent years Parr, a prolific photographer who best expresses himself through books, has continued shooting assignments in medium-format color, but has also experimented with fill-in flash and a 35mm ringflash camera. His subject matter continues to be the study of the idiocies of mass tourism as well as the spiritual crisis of the lower classes and the middle class. He shows us an environmentally destroyed world in which the major saving grace is a gritty, very British sense of humor. He has shot several film documentaries and a TV documentary, "Think of England".