Martin Parr photobook

Martin Parr; Home and Abroad

Because Martin Parr's work has been such a great influence to me during this project, I felt it was definitely necessary to look at a photo book by him. Parr has made numerous photo books so I felt looking at one of his books should be great inspiration as he is very experienced in this field. I've looked at many books during my research, but when I was looking for inspiration from these books, I was focusing heavily upon the placement of images in the main body of the book. Now I had finalised the layout of my images, like I mentioned in a previous post, I had the more final touches to make such as the placement of text. The beginning of a book is very important and I have come to notice that over the months I have been researching books this project. 

If one takes notice of a book, The book rarely will start as soon as you open it. There are often series of blank pages, title pages, acknowledgments and pages of text ect before getting to the main images. I noticed that in Parr's book and several other photo books that there is often a page to the left with an image on, then writing to the right, with either the introduction written on or the title of the book. I really like this layout here in 'Home and Abroad' and think the use of the image to the left hand side really does set off the double page. 

Quite similarly to my own ideas for my book, Parr focus' upon placing images on the right hand side of a double page. Obviously there shouldn't have to be any standardisation of how images should be laid out in a book, however I have come to learn that in photo books, this style of layout is a common occurrence. 

Parr often address social issues or tries to say more with his photography than just it being a simple documentation of everyday life. Whats interesting about this book is the way you can evidently see he has purposely placed certain images side by side with each other. He has very obviously not just placed these images side by side because they 'look good' or look balanced across the double page. However he has placed these images liked this in order to try and say something deeper. 

For example the bottom image, you can see one image is mothers with children in prams while the other is a mother with her child in a shopping trolly. He creates a comparison with the placement of the two images, leading the viewer to look between the two images and question what is is he is trying to say. I personally feel like the comparison being created is on one page what we would class normal 'typical' mothers to look and act like then the comparison is the fact maybe that caring sense of motherhood is slightly lost in the fast paced society we currently live in when it comes to shopping and buying material goods or the fact todays society is so based around consumerism we forget what actually matters and let our standards drop when it comes to things such as parenting.