When Martin Parr was 14, a teacher described him in a school report as "utterly lazy and inattentive." The assessment couldn’t have been more wrong, or, perhaps, more telling.
That same year, Parr made a quiet and absolute decision; he would become a photographer. "It’s what I will do for the rest of my life, until I drop dead," he writes. "I knew when I was very young. It was a definite decision. Don’t ask me why. I just knew it was the right thing."
Now, decades into one of the most distinctive and provocative careers in contemporary photography, Parr is telling his story for the first and only time. Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr in Words and Pictures is a richly illustrated autobiography, pairing over 150 photographs with personal reflections that trace his journey from a camera-obsessed schoolboy to a global name in documentary photography.
For the uninitiated, Martin Parr is perhaps best known for his color-saturated, sharply ironic portraits of everyday life. British holidaymakers on windswept beaches, plastic trays of food, crowded queues, and the peculiar rituals of modern consumer culture.
When his bold visual style burst onto the scene in the 1980s, particularly through his now-iconic series on British seaside resorts, it scandalised the photography establishment. Over time, though, his work has come to be celebrated not only for its wit and subversiveness but for its unflinching attention to detail and society’s quiet absurdities.
The book, co-authored with his longtime friend, writer Wendy Jones, offers far more than a curated greatest hits. It’s a personal chronicle told in Parr’s distinctive voice; intimate, dryly funny, and self-aware. We meet the boy who obsessively collected train numbers and found beauty in the banal, and we follow him through a career that spans from documenting the last days of steam engines to capturing the first McDonald’s opening in Moscow, and more recently, the changing face of public life in the post-pandemic era.
Parr also pulls back the curtain and unveils how he works. From navigating tricky commissions and building trust with subjects to what really draws his lens – crowds, placards, eccentric fashion, bad weather, and the chaos of everyday life. The result is not just the story of a photographer, but a portrait of modern life seen through his eyes.
Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr in Words and Pictures is published by Particular Books (a Penguin imprint) and is scheduled for a UK release early September, priced at £30. According to The Bookseller, Penguin triumphed in a "hotly contested" seven-publisher for the rights to the autobiography.
In the US, the book will be published by Rizzoli, and will go on sale in February next year for $60.
you may also like
If you are interested in Martin Parr's work, I am Martin Parr is a documentary on the Magnum photographers' life, released earlier this year. Also see our rundown of the best photographer autobiographies ever published
