For some the rich is the new poor

Magnum agency photographer Martin Parr argues that to regain the attention and support of mainstream press photojournalists have to ”get modern”: stop ”trying to change the world” and ”disguise things as entertainment.”

In a recent interview with Photo District News, Mr. Parr, whose work straddles documentary and fine art photography, says:

• About his retreat from ”old” fashioned photojournalism: ”I’m not going out doing campaigning photojournalism, because nobody wants that anymore. You have a few people that commission that—Newsweek and Time, for example—but there are very few opportunities there unless you’re at the top end.”
• About his definition of ”campaigning journalism”: ”The more traditional humanistic approach as personified in the older Magnum, for example. (…) The old approach, whereby you try to change the world. Nobody is going to obliterate war, famine, AIDS, and all the other things that are the usual subject matter that more campaigning photojournalists would be attracted to.”
• About his strategy to survive on the market: ”I shoot interesting subject matter but disguise it as entertainment. That’s what people want in magazines. I like to play the game where you can get interesting ideas in, but almost in disguise.”
• About examples of such matters with a disguised message:
  ”I went recently to the Beijing car show. It struck me as being a very interesting place to look at [the new world order]. Obviously the explosion of cars in China is a big issue. The best way to illustrate that is to go to the car show where you see people and cars together in huge quantities. (…) The message is ambiguous and open ended. I’m not preaching. I’m not saying the phenomenal growth of cars is entirely right or wrong. Like everything in the world, there’s a good side and a bad side.”
  ”Another story I did last October was about millionaires in Moscow. I did the Gulf art fair. All these things in the end have been quite beneficial to me in terms of sales. And they’re constantly adding to my portfolio of work. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle I’m trying to work out as we go along about my relationship to the world we live in.”
• About what is the central theme now for Mr. Parr? ”Wealth to me is as much to me the front line as poverty traditionally was.”

Magnum Photos, as its website says, is a photographic co-operative of people who chronicle the world and interpret its peoples, events, issues and personalities.

Famous photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson said once: ”Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire totranscribe it visually.”

 

 

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