PARR REPLIES
November 3rd, 2008 adminThere’s a brief reply from Martin Parr on the Flickr group in response to a comment about his Newcastle photographs, which I’ve copied out here-
Caro11ne 
says:
As a relatively recent resident of Newcastle (I grew up in Sussex, moved from London 5 years ago) I was appalled by the supplement on the city in this Saturday’s Gaurdian.
It is the most biased piece of misrepresentation of a city I have ever perused…
The photos are beautiful – no doubting that – but as an overview of a city (which this purports to be) it misses out more than 1/2 of the population, instead concentrating solely on the working class.
It lends one to think that the photographer had an agenda – and even in his opening spiel goes on about how “industry has not been replaced” and implies that the city is depressed… It almost begs the question, did he really come here?
Examples:
pic of tattooed man bbqing on Cullercoats beach – what about the yummy mummys and their bugaboos who I saw there every sunny day last summer?
pic of woman at Races, fag in hand, bottle of Echo Falls – did he search for these people?? – what about the boxes full of business people and solicitors, drinking premium champagne who gave up smoking, if they ever did smoke, when the ark docked…
and so moving on from dance halls and bingo to the rest of the population… what about a pic of the boys outside the Royal Grammer School; a glance at the >£1m houses in Gosforth or Jesmond, and their residents; something from the vibrant arts scene, both on the Newcastle and Gateshead sides of the river – the regeneration and money that’s gone into the Baltic, and the Sage is enormous, and the largest selling art gallery in Britain (the Biscuit Factory) has had pieces by Damien Hirst for sale and sold; it’s hard to get tickets for music of any kind, at the Metro Arena, the Carling Academy, or the Sage, it all sells out – but we’re all poverty struck??
It was my impression that you could have taken the photos in this supplement in Manchester, London, Southampton, Birmingham, Glasgow, (well, apart from the seaside one!) basically anywhere, so what impression of Newcastle does this give?
parrpolygon (aka Martin Parr) says:
“It is great that my photos can wind up the likes of Caroline so much. I had no agenda apart from looking round, finding photo genic situations and I believe that I am entitled to shoot what i like. I do not think the Newcstle supplement is down on Newcastle. In her list of what I photograph, she very conveniently misses out the more middle class subject matter, perhaps she had an agenda?”
November 4th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I think what people are missing out on here is that Martin has been given a job to do, so he goes out and does a professional one. He’s no longer hungry. He’s been there, and done it all,
but if people keep giving him the work, he’ll keep on doing it. I do think however that if, as he says, he was searching for the heart of Manchester, he perhaps should look in Manchester, and not Salford. Seedley is in Salford.
It reminded me of a Manchester photographer once captioning a shot of his in a calendar, of a hand holding a trumpet with the title ‘A tribute to Miles Davies’