"Ordinary extraordinariness"

Towards the end of Lee Shulman's documentary I Am Martin Parr (highly recommended and available on iPlayer, folks!), Grayson Perry claims - with ample justification - that Parr achieved what is effectively the holy grail for photographers: making a way of seeing.

Perry is among those to pay warm tribute in this Guardian article, reprising his argument from the film that the colour work for which Parr became famous flew in the face of the "performative seriousness" of so much documentary photography. Don McCullin - while himself an old-school advocate of bleak black-and-white reportage - acknowledges Parr's keen eye and sense of humour.

According to Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad of Photo London, Parr's core belief was "in the importance of looking closely at the world around us" - and what he saw, the Tate's Maria Balshaw notes, was "the changing spectacle of UK life in all its ordinary extraordinariness". Parr himself, meanwhile, was the personification of extraordinary ordinariness - a photographer who, in the words of his biographer-of-sorts Wendy Jones, seemed to be "anonymous and invisible". The key to seeing, perhaps, is being unseen yourself.

For fellow photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, however, "[t]he key to Martin's success was that he never lost that sense of wonder. In my experience the hardest thing with photography is holding on to the curiosity and naivety you had when you first fell in love with it." Hawkesworth credits Parr with inspiring him to find his own personal visual style. His anecdotes substantiate Benson and Farshad's claim that Parr's "unwavering support for emerging artists helped new voices to flourish".

In a separate tribute written for the Observer, Sean O'Hagan comments: "It strikes me now that he is one of those rare characters who will be acutely missed because he is irreplaceable." That may be true in many ways, but, as Benson and Farshad point out (and as I noted at the end of my review of the documentary), Parr will live on not only through his impressive body of work but also through the Martin Parr Foundation, which has "created a vital home for British and Irish photography, ensuring that future generations will have access to an extraordinary archive and a beacon for the study of visual culture".