British Photographer Dies at 73

Martin Parr, a photographer known for pictures of tourists that were both genuinely curious explorations of their lifestyle and wry indictments of it, has died on December 6 at his home in Bristol, England. His death was announced on Sunday by the namesake foundation that he founded in Bristol in 2017.

Though the foundation did not specify a cause, Parr was diagnosed with myeloma, a form of bone marrow cancer, in 2021. The Guardian reported this year that he was in remission, but that he was still taking chemotherapy tablets.

“The Martin Parr Foundation and Magnum Photos will work together to preserve and share Martin’s legacy,” the foundation said in a statement. “More information on this will follow in due course.”

Parr was among the most famous photographers of his generation. Know best for his pictures of sunbathers and sightseers, he published countless photobooks and did fashion shoots for Vogue, Gucci, and various other brands.

Though his subjects varied widely, Parr’s photography was always characterized by a certain crassness and a fascination with “low” culture. Depending on how you looked at his work, it was either unironically interested in its subjects or shrewdly critical of them.

From either perspective, the politics of his art was always opaque, which is one reason it could be seen from so many angles. Parr will next year be the subject of a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris that is themed around how he pictured climate change and overtourism. (Parr claimed that French audiences were always more receptive to his work than British ones, telling the Guardian, “they love photography more, they buy prints, they review shows.”)

He remains most famous for his 1983–85 series “The Last Resort,” for which Parr shot bathers at New Brighton Beach in England. In one image, a bathers is flopped out on the sand behind a dirtied tractor, without a clean view of the nearby water; in another, a tanning mother looks away from her crying baby, who gets more sun than she does. Both pictures seem to image a culture in thrall to the notion of relaxation, its people distanced from the possibility of actually reaching tranquility during their spare time. Upon its exhibition in 1986 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Parr became a star.

Parr continued that theme with his 1987–94 series “Small World,” in which he shot massed groups of sightseers in foreign locales, doing anything but looking at the sights they came to see. One beloved image, shot in front of the Tower of Pisa, shows people sticking up their hands, pretending to hold up the structure for a photo op. Those people have notably turned their backs to the structure itself, which dominates the picture. “Tourism is the biggest industry in the world,” Parr told the New Yorker. “I’m interested in the great conundrum, the contradiction between the mythology of these places and the reality.”

Series like “Small World” were notably divisive upon their debut. In his 2025 autobiography, Parr recalled that when “Small World” was first exhibited, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the modernist whose pictures defined an entire branch of modernist photography, told the artist that it was out of this world—in a bad way. Parr then told him: “I acknowledge that there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it.” He continued, “What I would query with you is, ‘Why shoot the messenger?’”

Martin Parr was born in 1952 in Surrey, England. He developed a love of photography early on, thanks in part to his grandfather, who taught him how to use a camera, and found himself on track for an art career when he flunked out of key school topics. He attended Manchester Polytechnic, the only school that accepted him.

Parr moved to Hebden Bridge, where he met Susan Mitchell, whom he later married. (They had one daughter, Ellen Parr, who survives him.) He started out shooting chapels before he and his wife moved to Ireland, where Parr continued to work mainly in black and white.

Then, once they moved to Wallasey, he transitioned to color, a mode that was still considered déclassé in photography, even as Americans such as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and William Eggleston had begun to show during the ’70s that it could be used artistically. While “The Last Resort” is relatively restrained in its color palette, later works would embrace sharper hues that only heightened the strangeness of his work.

Parr began shooting fashion photography in 1999 at the invitation of Amica, an Italian magazine. Many of his fashion photographs were notably not shot in a studio but in supermarkets, museums, and other sites. “For me, getting out in the real world, trying to make a real plausible picture that works, that looks interesting is the challenge and that’s what I’ve basically done,” Parr told Aperture ahead of his 2024 book Fashion Faux Parr. “I don’t think there’s any shots in the studio at all here. It’s all in the outside world.”

Throughout his career, his work moved fluidly across multiple industries. He joined Magnum, a leading photography collective known mainly for its documentary output, in 1994 and later became its president, running it from 2013 to 2017. He also regularly showed in art museums, with retrospectives staged at the Barbican Centre in London and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

He remained active into the later stages of his career, even as he battled cancer. He continued devoting much attention to his foundation, which runs a gallery and has provided to emerging photographers. “Hopefully it will be of some benefit,” he told the Guardian of his foundation. “I’m not going to say I’m saving the world. I never expect photography to change anything.”