The Tom Wood/Martin Parr approach

ZoneV

ZoneV

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Over the last few weeks I've been drawn towards the style and approach of these two photographers more & more.

They have a knack of immersing themselves in the heart of ordinary goings on, taking hundreds of spontaneous pictures (often from the hip or chest) and binning most of them. The ones they are left with though, are often magical moments of the everyday, perfectly captured.

Is anyone else inspired by these two photographers? Has anyone tried shooting in their style?
 
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I must confess I'd never heard of Tom Wood but Martin Parr leaves me absolutely cold. The image below is one of his from Magnum for example.

Put another way, why is it that martin parr's images are lauded as magical moments but when we have millions of people doing the exact same thing every day, capturing real life moments on their phones and uploading to instagram? We skip over them but Martin Parr is hailed as a visionary :)

I think the reason is that the Arts columnists have decided Parr is special and expect us to follow.

Maybe I'm alone in feeling it but I think most of his work is hugely overrated.

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I think Martin Parr's work is best appreciated as a body of work rather than individual standalone images. He tends to shoot around an idea so the images, especially his more recent work such as the last car parking spaces in car parks, are rarely individual aesthetic masterpieces to many people. Interestingly, his early work was quite conventional black and white documentary,
 
cedarsphoto said:
Put another way, why is it that martin parr's images are lauded as magical moments but when we have millions of people doing the exact same thing every day, capturing real life moments on their phones and uploading to instagram? We skip over them but Martin Parr is hailed as a visionary :)
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Because they are/were.

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Just because millions of people point their phones and cameras at similar objects and stick them on instagram, doesn't make them the same. It's not the cameras taking the photographs, it's the people behind them. There's a wry wittiness about the work, and a subtle lack of reverence towards the subjects that make interesting social comments. Couple that with the sublime technical skills on display (reckon you could work like this above.. on film?) and it makes for what was then utterly unique work.

I think you're making the mistake a lot of amateurs make, which is to look for the aesthetic, or pictorial, and upon not finding it, look no further. What are you suggesting, that he managed to somehow "fool" Magnum or something? :)

Plus.. I posted the above image, from the book "Last Resort" because that's probably what most people think of when thinking about Parr. One of the things that got Magnum interested was his earlier work. The project he did on June Street, Salford, where he documented the homes of working class people was for it's time, quite interesting, and a superb historical record of a way of working northern life that's now almost disappeared.

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Documentary is not about pretty pictures necessarily.




simonblue said:
I not sure Martin Parr shoots from the hip or chest :)
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No.. he doesn't. Neither does Tom Wood.
 
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ZoneV said:
Is anyone else inspired by these two photographers?
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Yes.What interests me most about these two photographers is the way they work, rather than what their photographs look like. You can apply other people's strategies to your own photography without making pictures that look like theirs. What I keep trying to incorporate in my photos is the 'looseness' I see in some of Tome Wood's pictures. I have stopped worrying about things being in focus quite so much as I used to. So that's been good.

ZoneV said:
Has anyone tried shooting in their style?
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No. Although sometimes I think their influence sneaks in.

Martin Parr still makes 'conventional' documentary pictures. Check out his Black Country Stories book if you can (http://www.martinparr.com/2010/black-country-stories/). It contains 'typical' Parr along with more traditional pictures. Far less critical of the subjects than is usually expected.

Some advice here from MP - no need to worry about getting a correct exposure, the camera does all that. :D

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg6VTRjIXmk
 
Interesting comments guys. @simonblue @Pookeyhead Regarding "shooting from the hip/chest": I may have been wrong about Parr but Tom Wood definitely does.

Watch the "What do artists do all day" documentary about him. When he's at the livestock auction he makes a point of the fact that even raising the camera to his eye can change a scene by attracting attention to himself (he wanted to capture the glances between bidders and auctioneer, not bidders and himself), so sometimes he shoots discretely from lower down.

Also, when the old farmer in the cafe finally warms to him after initially refusing to have his photo taken, Wood immediately takes a step back and takes a very quick shot of him from chest/neck height.

Heck. he even takes some shots holding the camera up in the air, one handed whilst riding a bike. :D

@Ed Sutton I've seen that Martin Parr video before and really enjoyed it. There's something quite liberating about that style of shooting where the emphasis is on shooting freely and a high bin-rate is perfectly acceptable. It frees you from the shackles of thinkng every shot has to be perfectly measured, assessed and internally approved before pressing the button and instead screams "just take the damn shot before the moment has gone!".
 
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It's not the cameras taking the photographs, it's the people behind them. There's a wry wittiness about the work, and a subtle lack of reverence towards the subjects that make interesting social comments.
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With all due respect, on the surface that sounds like it is less about the images and more about your own personal admiration for the photographer & the photographer's "cult of personality" turning into admiration for the images? Put it another way, if we were to play a game where I presented a similar instagram image vs. something from a Martin or a Tom you were unfamiliar with, would you still be able to hold it in such high esteem? Or is it more that Parr taking it is more important than what he actually shot? :)

This is why I compared it to instagram. If Parr is freely admitting he shoots hundreds of rolls and keeps a few images, then it's little different to millions of people shooting one or two images that are basically the same.

Couple that with the sublime technical skills on display (reckon you could work like this above.. on film?) and it makes for what was then utterly unique work.
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Could I do it? I don't know, if I was firing off hundreds of shots like he was then I imagine I probably could get a reasonable number of keepers. Whether or not I'd class the image above as a keeper is a different question ;)

I think you're making the mistake a lot of amateurs make, which is to look for the aesthetic, or pictorial, and upon not finding it, look no further. What are you suggesting, that he managed to somehow "fool" Magnum or something? :)
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Not quite, I think I'm more suggesting that Magnum has brilliantly fooled all of us into thinking this is "something" :D

I know what you mean r.e. the "amateurs mistake" and like to think that being aware of that kind of common failing I put effort in to not failing to it myself. I'm also quite diligent to avoid falling into the "UK club photography" trap too, whereby images are assessed based on how club judges would rate them or by following too linear a way of thinking about critique etc. I try to be as open minded as I can but at the end of the day I look at what he does and it just doesn't appeal on a nerdy photographer level, an intellectual level or an emotional level. A plate of chips is a plate of chips ;)
 
ZoneV said:
There's something quite liberating about that style of shooting where the emphasis is on shooting freely and a high bin-rate is perfectly acceptable. It frees you from the shackles of thinkng every shot has to be perfectly measured, assessed and internally approved before pressing the button and instead screams "just take the damn shot before the moment has gone!".
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It's also something that some people can't get their heads round. Reinforcing my thinking that there are intuitive photographers and others who have to plan everything in advance.
 
Ed Sutton said:
It's also something that some people can't get their heads round. Reinforcing my thinking that there are intuitive photographers and others who have to plan everything in advance.
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I think it depends on the subject matter. Some scenes are unchanging and some scenes change slowly. These are the pictures that can be planned and measured to utter perfection in advance.

Some scenes though are constantly and quickly changing, sometimes in many different ways at the same time. These are impossible to plan and measure in the same way because by the time you've done all that, the moment has gone forever. Intuition (as you said), anticipation and a good slice of luck too probably - you've just got to get in there and take the shots.
 
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For me the best image from Last Resort is this, with the implications of white trash. Last resort is a very interesting study of tourists at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding the wrappers with abandon - just what in this image is the white trash?
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Historically, documentary photography had concentrated slightly on the rich, such as Bill Brandt, or more usually on the poor, Riis, Hine, Lange, the FSA project. Parr concentrated on those he knew, the middle and working class. As manufacturing went into decline in the early 1980’s to be replaced with consumerism and leisure, so Parr photographed those on holiday at The Wirrel for his series (book) The Last Resort.

Not that it was well received at first - Art critic David Lee said:
“(Parr) has habitually discovered visitors at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding containers and wrappers with an abandon likely to send a liberal conscience into paroxysms of sanctimony. Our historic working class, normally dealt with generosity by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience. They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity. They wear cheap flashy clothes and in true conservative fashion are resigned to their meagre lot. Only babies and children survive ridicule and it is their inclusion in many pictures which gives Parr’s acerbic vision of hopelessness its poetic touch.”

BJP said:

“This is a clammy, claustrophobic nightmare world where people lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black ponds, and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.”


But the article puts it well when it says: “…there is a profound sense of sadness in this series. The pictures, telling tales of ordinary lives, depict groups of people spending their leisure time in shabby resorts just to escape the daily grind – usually for the benefit of the children.This run-down town, temporarily full of people from other run-down towns and cities was symptomatic for Parr of a supposedly affluent society falling apart at the seams.



 
In all his work there’s a hint of his judging the people he is photographing, a hangover from his methodist upbringing perhaps, feeling the need to show not necessarily the best side of people. His stay in Hebden Bridge was cut short when the locals he was photographing became aware he was using them.
 
cedarsphoto said:
Maybe I'm alone in feeling it but I think most of his work is hugely overrated.

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As for this image, wasn't this taken from his series looking at the Scottish diet, which also included deep fried mars bars, fairy cakes etc? So no on it's own probably nothing, but as a series with some social commentary documenting the poor diet, possibly explaining why the scottish have such a poor life expectancy? It suddenly becomes more relevant.
 
cedarsphoto said:
With all due respect, on the surface that sounds like it is less about the images and more about your own personal admiration for the photographer & the photographer's "cult of personality" turning into admiration for the images? Put it another way, if we were to play a game where I presented a similar instagram image vs. something from a Martin or a Tom you were unfamiliar with, would you still be able to hold it in such high esteem? Or is it more that Parr taking it is more important than what he actually shot? :)

This is why I compared it to instagram. If Parr is freely admitting he shoots hundreds of rolls and keeps a few images, then it's little different to millions of people shooting one or two images that are basically the same.



Could I do it? I don't know, if I was firing off hundreds of shots like he was then I imagine I probably could get a reasonable number of keepers. Whether or not I'd class the image above as a keeper is a different question ;)



Not quite, I think I'm more suggesting that Magnum has brilliantly fooled all of us into thinking this is "something" :D

I know what you mean r.e. the "amateurs mistake" and like to think that being aware of that kind of common failing I put effort in to not failing to it myself. I'm also quite diligent to avoid falling into the "UK club photography" trap too, whereby images are assessed based on how club judges would rate them or by following too linear a way of thinking about critique etc. I try to be as open minded as I can but at the end of the day I look at what he does and it just doesn't appeal on a nerdy photographer level, an intellectual level or an emotional level. A plate of chips is a plate of chips ;)
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I agree a plate of chips is a plate of chips. But have you looked at the rest of the images from that project and considered it as a whole? Not everyone's cup of tea, and some of his stuff I saw recently smacked of self indulgence, but his work does provoke debate.

Instagram is less about bodies of work and more about individual images. And to a greater or lesser extent, so is camera club photography. Neither can be held up as the gold standard for art / idea based photography. Consider as well the means of viewing - I would contend that viewing the images in a book or an exhibition would give the viewer more opportunity to study and take in the work as a collection and to understand it than the 3 second glimpse on instagram or viewing it on screen or easel in a camera club competition.

All that being said, there was resistance from a number of Magnum's members to Martin Parr being elected!
 
Byker28i said:
For me the best image from Last Resort is this, with the implications of white trash. Last resort is a very interesting study of tourists at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding the wrappers with abandon - just what in this image is the white trash?
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How you view The Last Resort depends a lot on your own background and prejudices IMO. I don't see 'white trash' (although I can understand that reading) I see Scousers having a day out - perhaps because I'm from a (faded) seaside resort in the north west of England the pictures make me smile with recognition as well as affection (admittedly, partly out of nostalgia). Litter is just part and parcel of seaside towns. The book is worth comparing with Ken Grant's work on a similar theme from similar places, Grant being an insider while Parr an outsider.
 
Ed Sutton said:
How you view The Last Resort depends a lot on your own background and prejudices IMO. I don't see 'white trash' (although I can understand that reading) I see Scousers having a day out - perhaps because I'm from a (faded) seaside resort in the north west of England the pictures make me smile with recognition as well as affection (admittedly, partly out of nostalgia). Litter is just part and parcel of seaside towns. The book is worth comparing with Ken Grant's work on a similar theme from similar places, Grant being an insider while Parr an outsider.
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Yes, that's how I see it too. Was "white trash" even a "thing" back then?

I remember those wire-mesh bins from my childhood days at the seaside too. Always full to overflowing and often enveloped in a mist of angry wasps! :eek:
 
But when you study Parr you see that his work is generally judgemental, he's judging, and asking the viewer to judge the people in his images. It's a common theme with his work
 
I see it more of a comment on British culture in general rather than the people in the shot. The comical juxtaposition of visiting a place of beauty for a nice break (the beach), and trashing it!
 
Byker28i said:
But when you study Parr you see that his work is generally judgemental, he's judging, and asking the viewer to judge the people in his images. It's a common theme with his work
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That doesn't preclude other readings of his pictures. Just because he might want me to see them as judgemental doesn't mean I have to. I could see them as being as much about Parr's embarrassment at suffering from the inhibitions of the lower middle classes as about the squalor the working class tolerate. Why does he point a camera at people enjoying themselves instead of joining in the fun? :D
 
They are not the same person - no-one is.

I repeatedly get the impression that Parr is taking the urine out of who and what he photographs. Perhaps a more polite way of putting it would be to suggest that he seems to cultivate a cerebral form of witty observation.

Wood comes over as a more compassionate observer.

I could be wrong .....
 
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ZoneV said:
Interesting comments guys. @simonblue @Pookeyhead Regarding "shooting from the hip/chest": I may have been wrong about Parr but Tom Wood definitely does.
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If yo mean shooting from the hip as in vaguely pointing the camera in a direction and hoping you have something, then no he doesn't. Just as Bill Cunningham doesn't either despite appearing to a great deal. It's a skill honed over many years, especially when using manual cameras. While I can't answer for Tom Wood, I know Bill Cunningham shot like this too, and it was never because they were to scared or shy to put the camera to the eye. If you've ever seen Bill Cunningham work you'll KNOW it's not through shyness or fear :). It's because that was a perfect angle to shoot from. Sometimes the camera at eye level just sucks. One of the reason I love portraits from medium format is because the camera is at waist level. Gives a totally different look.

I can't imagine Tom Wood is too shy or fearful to raise a camera to the eye either. Sometimes though... you can't disturb a moment and raising a camera can sometimes draw attention to you at the wrong moment. I get that, yes, but all too often amateurs start using "sneaky" methods of obtaining images of people in public spaces (such as shooting from the hip) as a default working method - usually through fear or shyness, and overall, in most situations, it just results in crap.
 
I will admit, being involved in this discussion has made me try to look at their work in a different way. Although I still maintain my original opinion it was useful to be told what others see in it and what I should be looking for.
 
Pookeyhead said:
If yo mean shooting from the hip as in vaguely pointing the camera in a direction and hoping you have something, then no he doesn't. Just as Bill Cunningham doesn't either despite appearing to a great deal. It's a skill honed over many years, especially when using manual cameras. While I can't answer for Tom Wood, I know Bill Cunningham shot like this too, and it was never because they were to scared or shy to put the camera to the eye. If you've ever seen Bill Cunningham work you'll KNOW it's not through shyness or fear :). It's because that was a perfect angle to shoot from. Sometimes the camera at eye level just sucks. One of the reason I love portraits from medium format is because the camera is at waist level. Gives a totally different look.

I can't imagine Tom Wood is too shy or fearful to raise a camera to the eye either. Sometimes though... you can't disturb a moment and raising a camera can sometimes draw attention to you at the wrong moment. I get that, yes, but all too often amateurs start using "sneaky" methods of obtaining images of people in public spaces (such as shooting from the hip) as a default working method - usually through fear or shyness, and overall, in most situations, it just results in crap.
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I agree with that, however all I said was he sometimes shoots from the hip. You said he didn't and I showed you an example where he did.

Like I said, at the livestock auction, if he'd raised the camera to his eye then everyone would've known he was about to take a picture and they may have changed their behaviour, stiffened up or looked at him, ruining the shot he wanted to capture. So he chose to shoot more discretely without raising the camera to his eye instead and the results can be seen from the photo's - it's almost like be was invisible. That is " shooting from the hip".

Thinking about it, when Wood was aiming the camera over a hedge as he wobbled along precariously on a bike (seriously, you have to see it! :)) I think he was relying on a lot more luck than most photographers would ever admit to. And why not? I think it's refreshing.

Edit: here is the documentary I keep going on about. :) It's well worth watching.

Part 1.

Part 2.
 
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ZoneV said:
Thinking about it, when Wood was aiming the camera over a hedge as he wobbled along precariously on a bike (seriously, you have to see it! :)) I think he was relying on a lot more luck than most photographers would ever admit to. And why not? I think it's refreshing.

Edit: here is the documentary I keep going on about. :) It's well worth watching.
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Seen it many times.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Seen it many times.
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It's great, isn't it? Watching him at work on the bus, always looking, thinking, grabbing shots. Fantastic stuff.

As Wood says, he might take 50 shots around an interesting scene and 48 will be "ok" but don't "live" and don't "work", but in one or two "something else" happens. Those are his keepers.

And as Parr says when addressing the photography students in the video earlier in this thread, "Most of what I take is crap, I can't emphasise that enough... You have to take the crap to get the good... Promise me you'll take more crap!"

This is an epiphany moment for me.
 
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While I can't say I work like that myself, it's certainly true that not shooting will only guarantee that you'll not get anything. The more you shoot though, the more you have to edit, and editing is a skill in itself (by edit I do not mean processing, I mean literally choosing from many). There are obviously people in this thread who would have binned a lot of great stuff :)
 
The way I look at taking photographs is that most of them equate to sketches. I make them to practice making pictures and to work ideas out. That most are rubbish doesn't matter. Some will be complete junk, others will have something in them that is worth keeping for future reference (sometimes I work out what is good in them with the passage of time, or they might even 'work' in a specific context), a few will be decent.
 
I tend to think of any creative or innovative endeavour as like waves on the sea, it is incredibly rare to get a big wave without it being surrounded by waves of all other sizes so the way to get a "big" idea is to splash around a lot. That is not to say that the "splashing" is just random, it can be done in a directed way but the more waves (photos, ideas, whatever) that are created the more likely it is that things will come together to make a big splash. Also it is not just the "splashing" of one individual that contributes to an individual's output, looking at other people's work and building on it is far less time and energy consuming than trying to work in a vacuum.
 
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