Martin Parr is a British photographer whose style is recognized around the world. Famous for his street photography that verges on being voyeuristic, he has captured a catalog of thousands of images of British life during his long career.
Parr has recently teamed up with Google Pixel 6 to re-imagine some of his most iconic images – fun shots that show some of the quintessential quirks of British culture and people ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee this week.
Martin Parr is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation, with over 100 books of his own published. Parr’s work has been collected by many of the major museums, from the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He established the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, UK, in 2017.
A collection called Tell Me You’re British, Without Telling Me You’re British is made up of 4 photos from his seminal work (all of the shots were previously taken in the UK). What links them together is the humor and eccentricities of British life, as seen by Parr, but he has removed a few elements from each photo in order to explore what "Britishness" really means. In one photo we see holiday-makers queueing up for an ice-cream van disappear, and in another, a sign for strawberries vanishing.
"Sometimes you can say more by showing less," Parr comments. "All the time though, I am aware that humor and understatement are good tools to have working on your behalf."
Martin Parr, now 70, is considered a master of photography, but this is the first time that he has edited his work in this way. The Google Pixel 6 has a Magic Eraser photo-editing tool and this is what Martin to remove the elements in the images. "This [Magic Eraser] tool will really come into its own when I do fashion or commercial work, and one has the artistic license to edit the images to help create the image with judicious editing to achieve the desired effect,’’ he adds.
The Magic Eraser tool is only available on Google Pixel, and it uses AI tech to detect distractions in photos to suggest what might need removing – or the user can choose themselves.
As the nation dusts off the bunting and prepares for street parties ahead of the Queen's Jubilee weekend, new research reveals that 87%* of Brits say taking photos is important for capturing a memory (52%) but nearly half (44%) would crop out unwanted people or elements from the background of their photos – that's according to a a YouGov survey of 2,000 UK adults. The Magic Eraser tool is one way that Brits could get rid of unwanted photo bombers as they celebrate the Jubilee.
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