Following on the heels of Martin Parr's limited-edition, album-style publication Life's a Beach, Aperture now presents this beach-friendly mini edition. Parr has been photographing the topic of the beach for many decades, documenting sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge and the eternal sandy picnic. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the publication of The Last Resort (1986), which depicted the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool. What is perhaps less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and of course, the U.K. The compilation brings to the forefront Parr's engagement with a cherished subject matter--that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together. This book shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.

In the United Kingdom, one is never more than seventy-five miles away from the coast. With this much shoreline, it's not surprising that there is a strong British tradition of photography by the seaside. American photographers may have given birth to street photography, but according to photographer Martin Parr, "in the UK, we have the beach!" Here, he asserts, people can relax, be themselves, and show off all those traces of mildly eccentric British behavior. Parr has been photographing this subject for many decades, documenting all aspects of the tradition. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool. What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches across the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and of course, the UK, among others. This book shows Parr at his best, startling us with the moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in the rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.

Martin Parr's Bad Weather is the debut book from Britain's most world-renown and prolific photographers. Armed with wry humor (and a water-proof camera), Parr captured the social landscape of the UK during downpours, snow storms and the most challenging elements. Published in 1982, Bad Weather has been long out of print and is one of Parr's most sought after books. Books on Books # 17 offers an in-depth study of this important photobook including a new essay by Thomas Weski called Even the Queen Gets Wet.--Publisher.

A revised edition of the classic book that launched Martin Parr and transformed the world of documentary photography.

In 1975, fresh out of art school, Martin Parr found poor footing in the London photography scene, so he moved to the picturesque Yorkshire Pennine mill town of Hebden Bridge. Over a period of five years, he documented the town in photographs, showing in particular the aspects of traditional life that were beginning to decline. Susie Parr, whom he had met in Manchester, joined him in documenting a year in the life of a small Methodist chapel, together with its farming community. Such chapels seemed to encapsulate the region's disappearing way of life. Here Martin Parr found his photographic voice, while together he and Susie assembled a remarkable and touching historic document--now published in book form for the first time. The Non-Conformists takes its title from the Methodist and Baptist chapels that then char - acterized this area of Yorkshire and defined the fiercely independent character of the town. In words and pictures, the Parrs vividly and affectionately document cobbled streets, flat-capped mill workers, hardy gamekeepers, henpecked husbands, and jovial shop owners. The best Parr photographs are interleaved with Susie Parr's detailed background descriptions of the society they observed.

Photography and pop-culture buffs, get out your crayons and colored pencils! Martin Parr's colorful and tongue-in-cheek photographs--his comedy of contemporary manners--have been transformed into a coloring book. Here is Parr's affectionate and hilarious catalogue of human foibles--bad fashion choices, messy foods, trashy souvenirs and the tourists who buy them--rendered afresh. The book's eighty pages are packed with the most iconic and beloved Parr images, made into original drawings by Jane Mount, offering hours of coloring entertainment.

In a unique visual dialogue, Deja View brings together the work of beloved photographer Martin Parr, master of capturing the art in everyday existence, with The Anonymous Project's archive of unidentified vintage slides, collected from across Europe and America. Surprising and delighting in their similarity, these affectionately matched images celebrate photography's power to capture the small moments of humour, warmth, ennui and absurdity that are in fact our most important of all.

British photographer Parr uses his camera to skewer the affluent consumer culture now pervasive in his home country and throughout Europe. He is critical and pessimistic: in some of his ironically colorful pictures, fast-food consumers are literally ankle-deep in trash, and a kind of consumerist stupor seems to overtake most of the faces. Yet at the same time Parr is humorous, poking fun at a bare-breasted sunbather bottle-feeding her baby, at frenzied supermarket shoppers with crazily overloaded carts. The spirit of the late Tony Ray-Jones, Parr's compatriot whose delightful A Day Off (1974) showed the English at play, hovers over Home and Abroad. Sadly, Parr's English have gotten duller, gained weight, and lost touch with their delightful traditional eccentricities since Ray-Jones' day. Perhaps even Ray-Jones might today see the English as Parr has--homogenized and zombified by material goods. Or perhaps Parr simply has a darker vision. Gretchen Garner

Only Human is a major new book on prolific British photographer Martin Parr, published on the occasion of his important solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London during the Spring of 2019. It explores one of the most engaging aspects of Parr's work - people - and features brand new work from the last decade.