Martin Parr Quotes

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

I've been really interested and inspired by Nan Goldin, the photographer.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

A camera gives you a purpose.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.