Martin Parr on six living photographers whose work he loves

Known for his droll, often farcical photographs of everything from sunburned holidaymakers to sozzled hen dos and rain-soaked British royalists, Martin Parr has another side: a curator, collector and champion of photography in all its forms. Parr was the guest artistic director at one of the world’s most prestigious photography festivals, the Rencontres d’Arles, in 2004 – a vintage year, critics agree – and curated the 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial, introducing many new talents to a wider audience. In 2017, he set up the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol to showcase emerging or neglected UK-based documentary photographers.

This year he is the Master of Photography at Photo London. To celebrate, FT Weekend Magazine invited Parr to select six living photographers whose work he loves and explain why. A miniature exhibition, if you will. — Andrew Dickson

Clémentine Schneidermann & Charlotte James

I came across Clémentine’s work when she was still an MA student at the University of South Wales. She had this really fascinating project going: she’d been working with a stylist called Charlotte James, taking pictures of kids from a former mining town in the Valleys. Clémentine is from France originally, but Charlotte grew up in that area. As soon as we saw the pictures, we offered them a show at my foundation in Bristol in 2019, which gave Clémentine one more summer to shoot.

It’s Called Ffasiwn is a great combination of landscapes and fashion photography (“ffasiwn” being the Welsh word for fashion). The kids would make these extraordinary clothes, guided by Charlotte, and then Clémentine would shoot them in estates, in front of houses, against the landscape. The kids look great; you can tell they’re all in on it. The prints are big: when you see them on the wall, they really dominate. It’s great to see a young photographer produce such strong and bold work; I can’t believe she was still a student.

For the opening, we hired a coach and all the teenagers came across. It was the first time some of them had been in an art gallery, I think. Even now, I remember the squeals of delight.

Markéta Luskačová

The 78-year-old Markéta Luskačová is, to my mind, one of the best photographers living in the UK. She’s originally from Prague and arrived here in the 1970s. Her work documenting London’s Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets, which was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1991, is stunning. (Markéta’s images are the most distinctive I’ve seen of these well-documented areas.) She even did a book on the musicians that played there; you can tell they were totally relaxed with her photographing them.

In the late 1970s, she was commissioned by the Side Gallery in Newcastle to photograph the nearby seaside town of Whitley Bay. Markéta brought her toddler son with her and would leave him with different families while she shot, becoming part of the furniture of the beach. In 2019 RRB, a Bristol-based publisher, wanted to publish a book of these photographs called By the Sea, and we at the foundation jumped at the chance to show them at the same time. They offer an empathetic, beautifully observed portrait of beach life.

Sebastián Bruno

It’s such a great story, this. The Abertillery and Ebbw Valleys Dynamic was a community newspaper founded in the South Wales village of Abertillery in May 2015. The two men who set it up, Tony and Julian, did so basically because they wanted to. They had a page-three slot called Sheep of the Week, ran pub reviews and campaigned to stay in the EU in a massively Leave-voting area. It became this huge success locally, while also really struggling financially. It’s currently not being published, but they say they want to bring it back.

Sebastián is actually Clémentine Schneidermann’s boyfriend — I think he just walked into their office one day and asked if they needed a staff photographer. Just as The Dynamic wasn’t like any local paper you’ve seen, so Sebastián’s images aren’t remotely what you’d expect. They’re surreal, funny, a little weird, totally in keeping with the paper. But there’s a lot of empathy here too. We’ve just opened a show of these pictures at the foundation. Sebastián has recreated a mock-up of their offices inside the gallery.

“The Dynamic” is on display at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, until July 2. A book of the project will be published by ICVL Studio

Stephen Gill

One of the things I really like about Stephen is that he’s always searching for new ways of doing things. For a long time he took pictures of Hackney Wick in east London using a plastic box camera that he bought for 50p. Around 2010 he developed this idea of putting things physically in his camera: loading actual objects into the body of the camera, next to the film.

That year he made a project for me in Brighton called Outside In. He would go to the beach and put in small crabs, seaweed, insects, things he found lying there, all sorts, then he’d take pictures. Somehow he figured out a way to load the camera and balance the light so everything combines. You get the background, then these other things on top. The images look amazing; sort of otherworldly, but also beautiful. You could recreate composites in Photoshop, I guess, but they wouldn’t look the same. They remind me a little of cyanotypes of plant life made by 19th-century photographers such as Anna Atkins. But they have this element of chance. You can’t pre-plan work like this. You put the ingredients together and see what happens.

Sticking crabs in a camera is a very Stephen Gill thing to do. He comes up with crazy ideas, but somehow it works.

Rinko Kawauchi

I remember first seeing Rinko’s work in 2002 or 2003. She wasn’t known much outside Japan at that stage. The photobook was called Utatane, published by a tiny press called Little More, and the images were amazing. She had such a distinctive voice — this childlike look at the world. Often you can see the influence of other people, but not with her. When you see someone who’s got a unique vision, it slows you in your tracks. I was really pleased to exhibit her at the Rencontres d’Arles when I was curating it in 2004.

It’s been wonderful to see her reputation grow and grow in the years since. She was recently awarded the Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography award. Utatane (which translates as siesta, or catnap) is now in its 11th edition.

I’ve met Rinko numerous times now, but I’ve never asked her how she makes the work, or how she gives her pictures that particularly magical quality. I’m not sure you need to know — you can just enjoy the way she looks at the world.

Even though the things she captures are so obvious, in a way — frying eggs, a split melon, a field of flowers, an insect — I realised that I hadn’t seen someone actually take pictures like this before. I still haven’t.

Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed grew up in the banlieue just beyond the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road that runs around Paris, so it’s an area he knows really well. When I first saw these pictures, I thought they were so striking. A lot of the people he was photographing, often young men, were friends of his. He shoots them on location, but he stages and directs them. The pictures are a bit observational, but also like history paintings; the series is simply called Périphérique.

Since the riots in 2005 — which were part of the inspiration for Mohamed’s project — we associate the French suburbs with being tough and difficult. Usually they’re photographed by photojournalists from outside, with all the clichés of the gritty concrete jungle you’d expect. But Mohamed has a natural empathy with the area and his subjects. The pictures have this rather melancholy, downcast feel. There’s an intimacy there that feels very special. He has unique access to this world.

We showed Mohamed’s work in the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010 and Périphérique has appeared in many different exhibitions since. It won the Deutsche Börse prize in 2020 and appeared as a book last year. It’s been great to see him doing so well.

Martin Parr is the Master of Photography at Photo London, May 10-14 at Somerset House, photolondon.org

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