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Arts feature

‘I enjoy the banal’: Stephen Bayley meets Martin Parr

Britain’s best-known photographer claims to like ordinary people but are his pictures celebratory or mocking?

27 February 2016

9:00 AM

27 February 2016

9:00 AM

‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant.

Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the mundane (or valorising crap, as I would put it), he is a devotee of the ordinary.

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