Martin Parr Quotes - Page 2

Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I'm a tourist. I'm a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.

The danger is, you have a formula and you just repeat it.

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically. On the other hand, you still have the option of controlling every technical aspect. It's the most accessible, democratic medium available in the world.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

I never think of photographs as being individual. Always as a group.

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.

Photographs are interpretations of reality; as such, it is entirely subjective. Most photos are taken with an agenda, to sell something or to make a subject look better than it really is. Think of family snapshots - everyone is smiling and happy.

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

When a mother takes pictures of her children on the beach, she doesn't take herself for an artist; she does it for love, which is an excellent reason, from my point of view.

I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.

Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It's sort of a soft version of propaganda.

I avoid Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and if I need to communicate with someone, I email direct.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Dictators are interesting, no?

Wealthy people have not disappeared, they are just not so willing to show off their wealth.

In 1982 I bought the newly released Makina Plaubel 55mm fixed-lens camera. With this shift from 35mm to 6 x 7, I also changed from black and white to color. Later that year, I started my project on New Brighton called The Last Resort. However, the first project I shot in colour was composed of urban scenes from Liverpool. This image was on the second roll of film. It's the first good photo I made in this new chapter of my work.

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.

I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the 80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain.