community in Liverpool and Manchester. When I changed to shooting in colour, I started by depicting a working class resort adjacent to Liverpool, and subjects such as shopping in Salford and the middle classes of Bath and Bristol. More recently I have documented the
establishment, with projects on Oxford University and the Livery companies of London.

“Presented here at Photo London are recent images that have not been shown before, mostly taken very recently and show highlights from my ongoing documentation of the British Isles. Many familiar subjects are found here such as my long fascination with the British seaside and the ongoing documenting of agricultural shows and summer fetes. New discoveries are always being made such as the wonderful steam fair in Dorset or the half marathon in Bristol.

“I think of these images as an interpretation of the many mixed emotions I feel towards my homeland. It is almost a love/hate relationship, and I find addressing this is almost a form of therapy for me.

“To complement this show is a grid of images taken from my Beach Therapy project. With my ongoing fascination with the seaside this is a set of images taken with a telephoto lens, where I explore distant figures on the beach, usually with out of focus greenery in the foreground. Although each is an individual work, they become a fascinating grid when put together.

“Finally, there are half a dozen photo deckchairs, again shot on the beach, to give people a chance to contemplate the work they have just seen.”

—Martin Parr, 2023

With 110 exhibitors coming from 55 cities across five continents, Photo London 2023 shows the very best of the past, present and future of photography worldwide. ‘Martin Parr: Recent Works’ leads the Photo London 2023’s Public Programme. It is accompanied by the group show ‘Writing her own Script: Women Photographers from the Hyman Collection’ and the Photo London Talks Programme curated by Aperture, which will feature a talk by Parr.

Photo London’s Co-Founders Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad comment:

“Martin Parr is quite rightly regarded as the godfather of British photography. It is no exaggeration to say that without Martin Parr’s exemplary practice today’s British photography scene would be much impoverished. It would certainly be a great deal less fun. He has been an unstinting and generous champion of young and overlooked photographers and through the work of the Foundation that he set up in 2020 (check) he has worked tirelessly to make photography accessible to all. In all this Martin’s work aligns perfectly with our own and we are thrilled to present him as our 2023 Master of Photography.”

Image : Martin Parr, Great Dorset Steam Fair, Dorset, England, 2022 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer and, in the last year before the collapse of the USSR, I was in Prague taking “visual notes” to inspire my writing and support my memory. One day, I came across the face of an older man, so ambiguous and beautiful. From this moment, things were reversed and images became more immediately tangible to me than words. That said, photography is also about creating a narrative, and my approaches to both writing and creating images share similar predilections. I certainly prefer allusions to descriptions. I love ambiguity.

I cannot imagine going somewhere without reading up on it first. I’ll visit Google Maps and Google Earth and try to imagine the streets, but of course the reality is always a surprise, with nuances I haven’t anticipated. This was taken in Lahore, to where I have returned almost every year for a decade. When I first came to Pakistan, I was overwhelmed and puzzled, but the country and its people grew on me.

I love the process of investigating new places, getting lost and identifying plots, characters and overtones. This past winter I had been staging portraits of local artists, and was riding my scooter on my way to meet one of them when I spotted this hand. As I rode past a large church, I saw the fingers popping out from behind a wall and thought: “Oh, that’s funny. I just saw the hand of God!”

I was in a hurry and could not stop, but I promised myself I’d return. When I did, I knocked at the door and had to persuade the guy in charge to let me in. It was a Christian church, and Christians are a religious minority discriminated against in Pakistan – the barbed wire in the picture indicates those safety concerns. Still, I was able to convince him of my innocuousness. The wall I’d seen the fingers poking above was part of the church’s compound and, once inside, I found they were attached to a huge concrete hand, one of a pair, surrounded by a flowerbed. The framing was evident. I just waited for a bird.

There are many other photographs I might have chosen as my best, but I enjoy the incongruity of this one. The way the fingers seem to be interfering with overhead wires is also what makes it for me. Lahore suffers daily power outages and it felt like I’d found the culprit. I have produced a series of diptychs with my black and white photographs of Pakistan, bringing together images in a bittersweet way. In one, a jumping boy seems twinned with a tangled mess of power cables, a further reference to the frequent cuts. In another of the diptychs, the photograph of the hand appears on the left while, on the right, a little girl stretches her own hand towards it.

Photography, for me, is a way of being in the world, of going into the world. It allows me to transmute my obsessive relationship with time, to meet people, tell their stories, and transmit emotions through the evocative power of images. Most of my earliest pictures were landscapes, although always with traces of human activity. At first, I was too shy to interact with people – I had to learn.

When taking photographs in Pakistan, it’s impossible not to be noticed, especially using a scooter in a country where it’s rare for women even to ride a bicycle. I am moved when old ladies greet me, and I can see in their eyes they are happy for me to have this freedom they never experienced.

Marylise Vigneau’s CV

Born: Ambilly, France
Trained: Master’s in comparative literature, University of La Sorbonne, Paris. A perspective-changing photography workshop with Philip Blenkinsop and Gary Knight.
Influences: “Novels influenced me more than anything. I was a solitary child, and I used to devour books. Among the photographers Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, Chris Killip, August Sander, Claudine Doury, Aun Raza, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Jason Eskenazi and Josef Koudelka.”
High point: “Every time a person agrees to be part of a project and be photographed. It is always a precious gift.”
Low point: “During insomnias, I sometimes imagine images that are impossible to produce. A mix of reminiscences, imagination and unlikely happenstances.”
Top tip: “I have been a curious and disobedient child, I became a curious and disobedient woman, and I owe my utmost joys, my dearest discoveries to these discredited qualities. Investigate, and find your narrative and an aesthetic to serve it. Reflect and dissent, including with your own prejudices.”