On reflection, though, after he had got in by a single vote, Parr took Cartier-Bresson’s words as something of a compliment. Being completely from a different planet had always been his calling card.
Since he first picked up a camera and exposed a few frames—his first photo essay, as a 16-year-old, was four snapshots of Harry Ramsden’s fish and chip shop outside Leeds—Parr scrutinized the world around him with a deadpan bemusement, as if planet Earth really were a final frontier, remote, unmapped, and he a latter-day Prospero, inviting us to marvel at its wonders or to shrink from its curious improbabilities.
For Magnum, the terrestrial landscape was cratered with war and famine and catastrophe; for Parr, the front line was a new one, one more immediately to hand: “I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket…” He dared to be dull.