Keeping it Real with Photographer Martin Parr

Photographer Martin Parr's uncompromising work, which spans both the fashion world and "real life" in Britain, is commemorated in a new book chronicling his illustrious career.

Runway looks in an art museum for Vogue, New York, USA, 2019.

For over half a century, the celebrated British documentary photographer Martin Parr’s unflinching images of Thatcher-era lingerie parties, New Brighton Beach-goers lounging near piles of litter, and kitschy Manchester malls have chronicled the absurdities of Britain’s consumer culture with humor and an idiosyncratic gaze.

Now, a new book offers an up-close look at Parr’s own commercial instincts. Fashion Faux Parr, to be published by Phaidon in April, is the first retrospective dedicated to Parr’s fashion oeuvre, spanning three decades of Vogue photoshoots and collaborations with brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, and Stüssy.

There are many ways to read the book’s punny title. Is fashion photography a crass side hustle for “faux Parr,” as opposed to the “real” Parr’s award-winning, documentary-style images? Or is it that his gritty, sardonic photos—models on the loo for Numero Tokyo, Urban Outfitters necklaces strewn atop dentures at a stall in a Marrakech souk, wrinkled French sunbathers decked out in Gucci—are seen as faux pas in the glitzy, make-believe world of fashion? Maybe the title refers to Parr’s choice to include professional hiccups, like a scrapped 2023 Balenciaga campaign, or a portfolio of emerging London designers that Parr shot “for a small magazine that didn’t pay the bill,” the introduction notes, “so the pictures never saw the light of day”?

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A spread from Fashion Faux Parr featuring backstage photos taken during fashion weeks in the late ‘90s and early 2000s

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A recent Gucci campaign featured in Fashion Faux Parr.

“You’re welcome to view it however you like, really,” Parr says, a wry smile creasing his face. But don’t read too much into it. “Fashion is just an extension of my own work. I’m using the same styles and the same techniques. That’s why when you look through the book you can tell it’s pictures taken by me because, hopefully, that style and that language and that palette come through.” The “one difference,” he notes, “is that I’m usually setting things up for photo shoots, whereas within my own work I’m just taking things as they really are out there."

The book’s 250 photographs mix the mundane with the magnificent, offering a seriously unserious view of the fashion diaspora. There are portraits of Dame Vivienne Westwood standing in a dingy public restroom wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Climate Revolution and see-through pants; model Stella Tennant collecting flower cuttings in Dunbar, Scotland; and designer Paul Smith sitting at his cluttered desk in London surrounded by stacks of books, fabric scraps, toys, and knick-knacks. A high-watt-age snap of Anna Wintour perched front row during Milan Fashion Week is sandwiched between grocery-store fashion shoots and models mugging for the camera at a gas station in Arles, France. “There’s mischief there—I think that’s the best word to use—that is maybe subversive, like going into a dental surgery,” Parr said. He was referring to one of the book’s highlights: a 2004 shoot for the magazine Kid’s Wear that took place at a German dentist’s office during an actual young patient’s teeth cleaning. “The surreal aspect can really turn a photo into a picture that you have to look at twice to try to work out what’s going on,” he says.

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Vivienne Westwood, London, 2012.

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Paul Smith, London, UK, 2016.

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A fearless and raw approach to photography has—perhaps unexpectedly—made Parr, a 71-year-old Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a designer darling. For a newspaper-printed magazine promoting Henry Holland’s Spring/Summer 2016 men’s collection, Parr photographed a scarf emblazoned with “Martin Fucking Parr” inside an ice-cream shop in the Greater Manchester town of Ramsbottom. “It’s a very rare scarf, actually. People ask me about it all the time,” Parr says. “I don’t know how many were produced, but it seemed to have sold out pretty quickly. I’ve got one in our archive."

Last year, he photographed Simon Porte Jacquemus’s extravagant waterfront runway show in Versailles for Le Chouchou, a limited-edition book published by the label, featuring Parr’s images of guests boarding white rowboats on the park’s Grand Canal. When Parr and Jacquemus hosted a book signing at the Jacquemus flagship on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Parr was treated like a fashion rock star. “We signed and dedicated 500 books in three hours and 20 minutes,” he says. So beloved is Parr among the fashion intelligentsia, in fact, that his name has become its own slang. While he was Creative Director of Gucci, Alessandro Michele once titled a watch campaign shoot “Time to Parr.

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Katz’s Delicatessen, New York, 2018.

Along with the work of equally revered fashion photographer Juergen Teller, the “dirty realism” of Parr’s images helped pave the way for the unguarded lenses used by many of today’s fashion documentarians, including Jack Davison, Harley Weir, and Sam Youkilis. “Fashion is about solving a problem: How do you make an interesting picture with a certain accessory or piece of clothing?” Parr says. “And documentary photographers—we’re people that shoot with ideas. So people want to use the ideas that we have and apply them to fashion problems."

There's mischief there—I think that's the best word to use.

One of Parr’s earliest fashion forays was in 1999, when the Italian magazine Amica flew him to Rimini, Fellini’s hometown on Italy’s northeastern coast, for a photo shoot using the seaside resort’s nightclubs and shallow waters as a backdrop. Instead, Parr photographed models in sequined gowns on the beach as local beefcakes flexed in Speedos, and elderly ladies in sun hats wandered into the frame. The editorial felt like a natural extension of Parr’s candid shots, which often serve as windows into how style steers identity in real-life Britons, whether it’s a spectacle of silk and brocade at a Sikh wedding, half-naked hen-party revelers, or a fishwife wearing a Burberry-style plaid headscarf. Love Cubes, a series from 1972 documenting couples who share the same taste in clothes, functions as a time capsule from a bygone era: women with Farrah Fawcett–style hair in polka-dot flares, men with bushy sideburns in three-piece suits.

“I think the distinction of what people are wearing is much more evident in my documentary work than in my fashion pictures,” Parr reflects. “I keep it real."