"If you saw Martin Parr and didn't know who he was, you would barely notice him. He is Mr Invisible and Mr Normal rolled into one." So begins Wendy Jones' introduction to this extract from her collaborative book with/about Parr. She's absolutely right - I said as much at the start of my review of Lee Shulman's recent documentary I Am Martin Parr (which is now available on iPlayer) and had it confirmed at Green Man last month, when Parr passed through the crowd unacknowledged by anyone except me.
And yet, as Jones also notes, his life has also been "a life of its century", remarkable in so many ways. "And he photographs it all. He's like a photographic Forrest Gump."
The title of the book, Utterly Lazy And Inattentive, is ironic. It seems absurd to think that those terms, taken from a school report, were ever applied to Parr, a man who is never not working and who has forged a career out of being observant.
In her introduction, Jones explains that Parr's reluctance to speak candidly and personally about himself ruled out a conventional biography, so she changed tack. By inviting him to talk about and through his pictures, she was able to elicit insights into both his worldview and his life.
The Guardian extract features some of his most celebrated images and covers everything from his switch from black and white to colour and Henri Cartier-Bresson's dislike of his Small World series on global tourism, to the perfect cuppa and the horrors of clingfilm.
An image of a woman at a petrol pump from Spending Time prompts Parr to set out what is perhaps his key principle, and one that rings true for so much documentary photography: "[T]here's something very interesting about boring. Something that seems very ordinary at the time becomes interesting when you look back at it later." In many ways, Parr's chief skill is his prescient ability to identify what will be most fascinating a few years down the line.
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