A Quote by Martin Parr

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist. — © Martin Parr
With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.
Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
I kind of talk about songwriting in the sense that it's really not my job to try to state hard truths. I'm not out to say this is what truth is, this is what's false, this is reality, this is not reality. What I prefer is to try to create a space where truth can move.
It's perversion. Don't you see what it is? It's not natural. To go to great expense for something you want, that's natural. To reach out to take it, that's human, that's natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don't you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.
I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not?
My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.
I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.
Anchors aren't just creating fiction; they're becoming characters in the fiction they themselves create. In the world of TV channels, facts are presented like fiction, so governments aren't inconvenienced; fiction is presented like fact, so governments stay happy.
Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.
Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.
My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
You do a drama, and you are limited by the rules of reality, and in science fiction, you create your own reality. Some people find that daunting; I find it challenging.
It is natural for us to pay attention to North Korea and human rights issues of North Korean defectors but I wish people would not try to create stars. The reality is different from Hollywood movies.
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