The Manx photographer spent decades highlighting the plight of working-class communities in northern England. A long-overdue retrospective reveals the enduring potency of that work.

The Manx photographer spent decades highlighting the plight of working-class communities in northern England. A long-overdue retrospective reveals the enduring potency of that work.
In a new photobook and exhibition, Pujara explores themes of home, identity and Britishness along the stretch of road home to the city’s Indian community
The exhibition, opening tomorrow, brings together the work of 12 artists who consider the complexities of human relationships with the land and climate justice
The Books on Photography festival returns this year with over 50 publishers and a rich programme of artist talks and events
Director Tracy Marshall-Grant gives insight into the year-long festival, and its aims to nurture a new cultural network and celebrate the communities of the port city
BOP Bristol 19, hosted by the Martin Parr Foundation and the Royal Photographic Society, will bring together 26 publishers, plus a series of artist talks
“Life was good, and perhaps my happiness was reflected in the way I photographed there,” says Markéta Luskačová, as she presents her work from the late 1970s in a new exhibition and book
John Myers is back with new book called Looking at the Overlooked – a good title for a photographer who specialises in images of the unremarkable, and who himself nearly fell from photographic history. Working in Britain’s post-industrial Midlands from 1973-1981, Myers created an archive of the unspectacular that attracted attention at the time but then lay undisturbed for 30 years until a chance meeting with a curator. A solo show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery followed in 2011, kick-starting a comprehensive reappraisal at his work that’s resulted in more solo shows and several publications.
Looking at the Overlooked is published by RBB Photobooks, which also published a collection of Myer’s portraits earlier this year. But where The Portraits focused in on pictures of people, Looking at the Overlooked is a glorious compendium of “the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s”. Focusing in on substations, shops, houses, televisions, and so-called “landscapes without incident” – or as Myers puts it, “boring photographs” – the images are all recorded with a deadpan aesthetic that’s won Myers comparisons to the celebrated New Topographics movement in the US.
Would you want Martin Parr to take your portrait? You might say its a brave soul who goes in front of his penetrating lens, but it’s part of a portfolio of benefits the Martin Parr Foundation is launching in its Membership Scheme.
Parr set up the Bristol-based Foundation in 2014 to house his archive, but in October 2017 it opened to the public in a purpose-built space, offering free access to much more – a rolling programme of exhibitions, a large photobook library, and a growing collection of prints. Parr’s used the opportunity to hone in on British and Irish photographers, as well as work taken in the British Isles by others, and put the focus on their documentary work – an area which he believes is still underrated.
“The term ‘Britishness’ has changed so much over the last ten years, I don’t really know what it means anymore to say ‘I’m British,’” observes Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid, who has spent almost a decade photographing people in the street across Britain. In 2011 he started work on his latest series, Town to Town, which has just been published as a book and which will be shown at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, UK from 31 January-12 May. Initially focussing on London, it soon expanded beyond the capital city and ended up covering 200 towns, tracing a journey around Britain and its diverse inhabitants.