Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express.
Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.
... I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It’s part of the test and I don’t have a problem with it.
Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography.
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures. Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically.
I am what I photograph.
From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note.... The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking.
