Reading Time: 2 minutes Lee Shulman, founder of the project, discusses a new book blending Parr’s archive with the vintage slides he’s collected for almost half a decade

Reading Time: 2 minutes Lee Shulman, founder of the project, discusses a new book blending Parr’s archive with the vintage slides he’s collected for almost half a decade
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Books on Photography festival returns this year with over 50 publishers and a rich programme of artist talks and events
Reading Time: 3 minutes The UK city’s major institutions will come together in a new biennial festival, alongside a year-round programme of commissions and collaborations
Reading Time: 2 minutes Don’t miss legendary documentary photographer Martin Parr in conversation with British Journal of Photography in an exclusive livestream event
Reading Time: 3 minutes Martin Parr, Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, and Orsolya Kőrösi are among the leading industry figures on board
Reading Time: 5 minutes As part of the institution’s growing commitment to photography, the National Museum Cardiff presents its first photography season
Reading Time: 4 minutes Robert Frank’s The Americans greatly influenced the course of 20th and 21st-century photography. His contemporaries, and those who followed, reflect on the enduring significance of his work
Reading Time: 5 minutes When the Portrait Gallery was established in London in the mid-19th century, its role was envisioned “to consist of those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history”. Opening in an era when photography was still a new and untried technology, the National Portrait Gallery (as it later became known) was intended to be the national repository of the images, chiefly paintings and drawings, of those men and, much later, women who represented what was best among the British hierarchy of achievements, skills and aptitudes. Its function was to hold up a mirror to Britain that reflected its qualities back to those who came to observe them, as object lessons about how to aspire to, or more simply respect, the qualities and moral standing of the great and the good.
This conception of the NPG may still be widespread in the public mind, as even Martin Parr thought his work would be an ill-fit for a contemporary exhibition along these lines. “I never thought of myself as a portrait photographer,” he says, “and when I first met Phillip Prodger [NPG’s former head of photographs], I told him I had only a few celebrity portraits. I just put a lightbox together and sent them to him, though I was quite surprised at what I had.” Prodger, however, had other ideas, seeing in Parr the work of a social observer who could also offer a portrait of a nation at a key point in its history. So it is that the NPG put together Only Human, on show from 07 March to 27 May, bringing together some of Parr’s most famous photographs alongside a number of works never exhibited before.
Reading Time: 3 minutes An architect for more than 40 years, Badger took up photography while studying in the mid 1960s, going on to exhibit at major institutions in Britain and the US. But he is best known as a writer, critic and bibliophile, contributing dozens of essays on the medium, and editing key texts such as The Photobook: A History