Remembering Martin Parr (and Sebastião Salgado)

This post is long overdue.

My personal tribute to Martin Parr — the English photographer, Magnum member, sharp observer of modern life, and perhaps most importantly (to me), champion of the photobook. When Parr passed in early December, tributes poured in from across the photographic world. He was clearly beloved, and rightly so.

I was never a devoted follower of his photographs. His work — satirical, colorful, often pointed — was impossible to ignore if you care about photography, but it never quite aligned with my own aesthetic. What I admired most was his deep commitment to the photobook.

Parr wasn’t just a photographer; he was a photobook collector and advocate for the photobook as a vehicle for showing our work. Parr's personal photobook collection ran to over 12,000 volumes which he donated to the Tate galleries in 2017. He also co-authored (with Gerry Badger) The Photobook: A History, a three-volume series covering over 1,000 examples of the form. I own Volume I and still hope to track down the others — though Volume II currently runs around $350 a copy! I will need to save up for that type of purchase.

Parr also established the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, England — a gallery, library, studio, and archive created to promote and support photography and photographers.

There’s something reassuring about a photographer of Parr's stature who believed so deeply in the photobook and its importance as medium of expression for our work. As someone who spends a fair amount of time browsing shelves, collecting, and slowly building a small personal library, I find that part of Parr’s legacy especially meaningful. The work matters, yes — but so does how it lives in the world.

While researching Parr, I dug through old issues of Aperture and found an article in the Summer 2005 issue. In an odd coincidence, that same issue included a series of remembrances of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had passed the year before. One anecdote stood out to me—both illuminating and humorous:

In 1991, Henri met the Dalai Lama, who was then teaching in the south of France. Henri told him, “Photographing is to be in the present moment,” a statement that could summarize the genius of the photographer who has been called “the eye of the century,” and also be applied to Buddhist meditation. The Dalai Lama loves to affectionately tease his friends and, as an expert debater, replied: “You photographers are never in the present. When you take a photo, you are in the future, because you expect a result—you wouldn’t take a photo with an empty camera, would you?—and when you look at the photograph, you are back in the past. So, never in the present!” And the Dalai Lama burst into warm laughter.

There’s something wonderfully humbling in that exchange.

And, finally, my personal favorite bit of Martin Parr trivia: he was acknowledged as holding the world’s largest collection of Saddam Hussein watches!

Earlier in the 2025, we also lost Sebastião Salgado — another giant, though very different from Parr. Salgado’s work has always felt closer to my own sensibilities. I was fortunate to see and handle some of his prints in New Orleans in 2022, and the experience left an impression. Beyond the photographs, his environmental work through Instituto Terra (which he founded with his wife Lélia) — restoring thousands of acres of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest — stands as a legacy that extends well beyond the medium.

If there is anything certain (as the old line about death and taxes reminds us), it is that time moves forward whether we are ready or not. Parr and Salgado leave behind extraordinary bodies of work — and institutions that will continue long after them. Lives well lived.