Some monumental news in this week's goings-on: none other than The Mr. Martin Parr here in the flesh in one of America's greatest flyover zones (hey a little self-deprecating humor goes a long way here in the Rust Belt), lecturing at the Akron Art Museum, Thursday 6 March at 630pm.
I remember first reading about Parr in the Magnum biography, I was a college senior hellbent on becoming a documentary photojournalist who was gonna change the world and pictures would be my weapon. So I'm trudging along, drooling over the words and photos of Paolo Pellegrin, Alex Majoli, Alex Webb, Josef Koudelka, etc.--then up out of left field comes this Martin Parr character w/ his garish colors, harsh flash, awkward compositions, and the anecdotes about his rocky start w/ Magnum as many of the group's hardcore photojournalists (likely including many of the ones I admired) flat out rejected the merits of his work and how it might contribute to the collective vision of the agency. But I couldn't stop devouring his photography; by the time I picked myself up off the floor from laughing uncontrollably after the second or third straight viewing of his Autoportraits series--I was hooked.
Discovering Parr's work was an early first step in re-examining and re-aligning my perspectives about my photography, and about photojournalism in general, and a catalyst for looking at the wider realm of photography outside of the newspaper-oriented photojournalism of my education up to that point. Most importantly it gave me further fuel to use photography as a form of cultural anthropology as well as critical examination of society and modern life, but now w/ fresh eyes.