Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.
At the end of last lesson you saw this photograph by Martin Parr and were asked to hold on to your first reaction.
Open your notes. What did you write down? Was it funny? Uncomfortable? Affectionate? Cruel? Sad? Something you did not have words for?
✍️ Write here: your first reaction from last lesson.
We are going to come back to that first reaction at the end of today, and see whether it has survived a lesson of looking more closely.
Martin Parr (1952 to 2025) was a British photographer, born in Epsom in Surrey and based for much of his life in Bristol. He joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1994 and later served as its president. By the time of his death in December 2025, he was one of the most widely exhibited and widely argued-about photographers of the last forty years.
He is best known for photographing ordinary British life, often at the seaside, often eating, often on holiday. His work is sometimes described as documentary photography. It is also sometimes described as social satire. People disagree about whether those two descriptions can both be true at once.
Before we say anything more about Parr, look at a set of his photographs. ✍️ Write here, in the space beside each photograph: one sentence on what this photograph is showing.
Try to be specific. Not "a family". Whose family? What kind of family? How do you know? Not "a beach". What kind of beach? Where does it look like? What time of year? What weather?
