Martin Parr said he was creating a fiction out of reality
Beach box, Mount Martha
This photo is my small tribute to the late Martin Parr. From inside the beach box I exposed for a rich, saturated beach but lit up the interior with a small flash. This gives the image an odd effect. Your eye is, for a moment, confused. There’s a frame within the frame; is the beach a painting on the wall? The scene on the beach is full of moments you could image as Martin Parr photos: the women with the bright pink inflatable; the dinghy in the foreground of the yacht; and perhaps best of all the young, red-headed, fair-skinned boy who’s fallen asleep in the centre of the frame exposed to the sun, you can picture old Marty with his ring-flash getting the image of the raw, pink skin and the blissfully unaware boy about to wake up and learn a lesson.
On the occasion of a new year, new web log
12.01AM, New Year’s Day, Yarraville
For the new year I’m going to try and write something each week. In part, I’d like to get better at taking photos and be more specific in my thinking about what makes a photograph good, but mostly I’d like to improve my writing. I’ve taken photos for 15 years, I might have taken 100,000 photos. One day I realised they’d gotten better, I didn’t try and get better – over time I just knew where to stand or when to wait. The more you do something the better you’ll get. There’s that thing about a monkey and a typewriter and a thousand years to write Hamlet – I don’t know the monkey would write Hamlet but I’m sure it would be a better typist.