A 9.5kg (21lb) ambergris stone, valued at more than €500,000 (£427.500), which was found in the stomach of a sperm whale on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. The whale was found dead on a beach in May 2023. The magazine Frontiers in Veterinary Science recently published the results of a necropsy that put the cause of death as toxic megacolon resulting from ambergris stone

Photograph: Iusa-Ulpgc Handout/EPA

I’m not sure if it’s the sexual component that catches my attention. Perhaps it’s some elements, especially snails, that evoke a sense of familiarity in me, but also nostalgia for something I can’t quite identify. There’s a call back to my childhood, and it’s precisely the snails that evoke it. They were my only playmates when I spent the summer in a remote mountain location, in my grandparents’ garden which after a storm became the perfect habitat for these small creatures, as slimy as they were curious. Back then, I would pick them up from their shells, place them on my arms, and let them slide over me, amused by the trail of slime they left on my skin. I didn’t know it then, but I was assimilating them. In fact, that’s exactly what Ivana Sfredda talks about in the photos she showed me a few weeks ago in her studio in Milan. Soak up is the title of the series still in work in progress that the Molisan photographer has been working on since 2022, or perhaps even earlier. Interpreting the Anglo-Saxon term “soak up” literally, it refers to the sensation of enjoyment perceived in the act of assimilation. A unique human and animal need, that of joining someone or something, of being connected, and of “annihilating the boundaries that delimit a body.”

Ivana Sfredda’s macro shots do not contemplate any subject hierarchy. A strawberry in a man’s mouth, a group of worms intertwined, a droplet about to fall from an old faucet, all appear one after the other in a carousel of images that dance hand in hand in a perpetual circle, without jerks or arrogance. Hand in hand, united, assimilated into each other, in the other. So that in the act of encounter between two bodies, there is no longer a “my body” and “your body.” The power dynamics that humans have built in the relationship between artifact and nature are nullified. Perhaps this is where my childhood memory fits in, where it is clear that in that space-time arc, I did not know of this imposition, and no construct had yet had time to settle in the logic that today exists in me, the inequality of man > animal or even more so, artificial > nature.

But there is something beyond this unconsciousness or yet uncorrupted consciousness. Ivana explains it to me by citing Mario Perniola, a philosopher, writer, and theorist of contemporary art, delving into the sexuality mentioned earlier. Because it is clear that in the union of two bodies there is a tension that moves them towards each other, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be laden with a pleasurable end. Perhaps it’s just an unconscious need to lose one’s original form?

«Perniola identifies in sexuality a point of suspension that he defines as neutral sexuality: the detachment from one’s own body that implies a sense of estrangement, cybernetic and indeed neutral. This erotic impulse detaches itself from the pursuit of carnal pleasure in function of an intense contact where the organic and inorganic body becomes a meaningful surface. A very powerful communication system that leaps beyond the categories of human/artificial, human/animal, animal/artificial – relative to being as such – which traces the fluid architectures of an alternative body.»

As explained by Ivana Sfredda, in the encounter with the other, the self feels fulfilled. This reminds me of a book I read some time ago when I was searching for a more conscious self. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle – found in the “esotericism” section of a bookstore – actually talked about this. It discussed how the self exists only in the reflection in the other, when the annulment of the ego occurs, which only defines the boundaries of a prison where a false narrative of ourselves lives. So, in Ivana Sfredda’s shots, which she explains to me are a sort of exercise and play, all this is visually translated, as if to illustrate the daily and widespread existence of continuous equal and harmonious connections between elements that seem distant both in a hierarchical and semantic sense.

«The series focuses on the meaning of contact and relational energy, an exercise in imagining how these incomplete relationships can represent profound portals of learning.»

Courtesy & Copyright Ivana Sfredda

‘I was surprised when Amica asked me about it,’ says the esteemed British photographer Martin Parr, recalling his fashion industry inauguration. ‘But I thought I will take on the challenge, and have never looked back.’ While today Parr shoots several fashion stories a year – from high-end brand campaigns and portraits to magazine editorials and backstage imagery – that first shoot in 1999, for the Italian women’s monthly, was the earliest example of Parr’s distinctive, oftentimes humorous, and aesthetic deliberately way of navigating the world of fashion.

Martin Parr: ‘Fashion Faux Parr’, published by Phaidon

Recently published by Phaidon, the joyfully titled Fashion Faux Parr is an exhaustive survey of the subsequent fruits of this relationship. High colour and boldly executed (it was designed by frequent collaborator Melanie Mues), the new fashion book serves to remind fans of how this unique partnership has played out over the past 25 years.

Alongside the well-documented campaigns for Gucci under former creative director Alessandro Michele – including the now-iconic image of a silver-haired sun enthusiast wearing bright white sunglasses at Cannes – is a queue of models pictured at New York’s famous Katz’s Delicatessen, part of a wider tourist-style portfolio commissioned by Vogue USA in 2018, and at Versailles, a backstage project for Jacquemus shot last year. Earlier street-led scenarios in Senegal, Cuba, Bristol and Broadstairs also feature, as well as accessories specials and British designer portraits.

While style has long been a core strain of Parr’s documentary work, organically acting as a signifier of a season, place, era or society, his fashion work more closely observes trends and particular moments, largely realised in tandem with art directors, stylists and beauty teams. ‘It varies,’ he notes, reflecting on the collaborative nature of the work. ‘With editorial fashion, you have more freedom and I enjoy bouncing ideas around with the art director. With commercial the script is pretty much established by the client, so it is a much tighter shoot.

‘I enjoy doing fashion and of course it brings in income, which helps me keep the foundation going,’ he continues, alluding to the Martin Parr Foundation, the gallery and archive space he opened in Bristol in 2017. ‘So my relationship [with fashion] is a good one.’

Indeed, while Parr maintains his own universe is very much still that of a documentary photographer – and it’s this work he’s best known for, as the designer Patrick Grant illustrates in the book’s introduction, identifying that he ‘takes pictures of old blokes staring at walls, socks and sandals, bottles of ketchup…bad weather and sunny tennis matches, Christmas dinners, chic interiors’ – the fashion world has been particularly positive of the match. Fashion Faux Parr might be his first fashion volume proper, but Gucci (which also collaborated with Parr on its Gucci ArtWalls series in 2020) and Louis Vuitton have also both co-signed monographs, and in 2005 Parr published a more tongue-in-cheek title, Fashion Magazine, in which he appeared on the cover.

As in his documentary work, there is plenty of charm and a certain richness in Parr’s fashion pictures; a particular warmth that gives the images, and perhaps the wider industry, a sense of accessibility, closely tied to his frequent practice of involving real people in his shoots. His approach is also often fairly straightforward – his perspective is what he offers – and he employs his surroundings to shape the narrative, rarely shooting in a studio. In previous interviews, Parr has spoken of the societal changes he’s observed in his decades-long career (mainly, the arrival of mobile phones), but what about the challenges he associates with fashion photography?

‘If there are a lot of models, it’s tricky to get everyone looking good and in position,’ he explains, relaying a hurdle similarly common to anyone instructed to take a family portrait. ‘You have to persist in shouting out instructions.’ Inevitably this perseverance pays off, and as the designer Tabitha Simmons remarks in the book, recounting a shoot day with Parr, he’s left ‘an indelible mark on the fashion industry’.

’Fashion Faux Pas’ is published by Phaidon, and available from phaidon.com now. Also available from waterstones.com

martinparrfoundation.org