The Non-Conformists Martin Parr

• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 168
• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication Year: 2013
• Size: 8 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN: 978-1597112451

Who knew Parr started his career taking thoughtful black-and-white pictures of small town life in England? “The Non-Conformists” was Parr’s first body of work after graduating from art school in 1975. But among the images of sheep grazing, grouse hunting and churchgoing, are glimpses of the humor we now so strongly associate with Parr.nThe New York Times MagazinenBeginning in 1975, when he was just out of art school, Martin Parr started a five-year documentary study of a fast-disaperring culture in the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge, England, and the surrounding areas. He was soon joined by Susie Mitchell, an aspiring writer he’d met as a student in Manchester, and who eventually became his wife. As she explains in the introduction to the book “We started tentatively to document things that seemed to be deeply traditional, or in decline, or both.” Nearly 40 years later, Martin Parr has finally compiled the images in a book. His photographs of farmers, mill workers, coal miners, game keepers, shop owners, henpecked husbands and other subjects are interspersed with stories Susie Parr wrote at the time about some of those same people.nPDNnThis is a lovely and melancholy book.nThe New York Times Book Review