Martin Parr quotes:

Places change all the time, and the type of people who live there change.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

When I fly British Airways, I can't help but read the free Daily Mail, which makes me glad I am leaving the country.

My biggest television weakness is 'Dragons' Den.'

If there is any jarring at all in my photographs, it's because we are so used to ingesting pictures of everywhere looking beautiful.

My black-and-white work is more of a celebration, and the color work became more of a critique of society.

We live in a homogenized world, where it's hard to get excited when everything is slick and professional. The interesting things are the dull things.

I get up early and open my emails, write cheques, and answer the phone; whatever needs to be done.

I don't like being flattered. It doesn't suit my English sensibilities. Remember, we are the great country of understatement.

When I am in London, all I do is mix with other people in the arts.

For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.

I always take photographs when I attend a funeral. Most people there know who I am and expect me to be there with my camera.

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

The knack is to find your own inspiration and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.

When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don't take a good picture,' what they mean is they haven't come to terms with how they look. They take a fine picture, it's just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.

The thing about tourism is that the reality of a place is quite different from the mythology of it.

Personally, I don't take holidays; I go on trips. My idea of relaxing is taking a trip that isn't commissioned. I'll work just as hard, but without that nagging pressure of fulfilling a commission. Now that's what I call a holiday.

I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.

The trouble with Hollywood films is that they always have a pleasant ending.

Taking photos is a form of collecting.

By default, I am a travel photographer. I work on a combination of commissions and personal projects that take me around the world.

One of the things I regret is that magazines now are so lifestyle-orientated that the opportunity to do bigger projects is gone. This is a serious misjudgment on the part of magazine editors.

I pride myself in being an aficionado of the British seaside. Throughout my career, I have visited and worked in many of the famous British resorts, from Great Yarmouth to Largs.

Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I'm a tourist. I'm a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.

If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterwards. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens you move on.

My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.

Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.

I never think of photographs as being individual. Always as a group.

We live in a difficult but inspiring world, and there is so much out there that I want to record.

I avoid Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and if I need to communicate with someone, I email direct.

I toyed with the notion of being an actor, and am so glad that this whim did not go any further.

Tourism is the biggest industry in the world.

The ability for us to laugh at ourselves is Britain's saving grace.

When I visited Vietnam for Oxfam, the thing that really struck me was how the local farmers had to prepare to evacuate or climb to their mezzanines with their valuable family possessions.

Modern technology has taken the angst out of achieving the perfect shot. For me, the only thing that counts is the idea behind the image: what you want to see and what you're trying to say. The idea is crucial. You have to think of something you want to say and expand upon it.

Of course, New Brighton is very shabby, very rundown, but people still go there because it's the place where you take kids out on a Sunday.

Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It's sort of a soft version of propaganda.

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

I am away so much, so I rarely see live TV, but I use iPlayer to catch programmes.

Margaret Thatcher was very good for the arts in so far as it gave people a real focus for something to be against.

I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the '80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain.

You can't shoot in sepia, so converting into black and white and then into brown makes everything feel less real.

Wealthy people have not disappeared, they are just not so willing to show off their wealth.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

You can easily take photographs at a wedding - no one would question it. But funerals are different.

There are 65 to 70 photography galleries in New York alone. In the U.K., there are no more than five, and they're all in London.

Filming is always a challenge because I'm not used to it. But I approach it head-on. I'm not technically brilliant, but it's the spirit that counts.

As we travel around Britain, I am convinced most of us cannot really appreciate what we are seeing. We take too much for granted, because it is all so familiar.

Modern technology has taken the angst out of achieving the perfect shot. For me, the only thing that counts is the idea behind the

All photography is propaganda.

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

Dictators are interesting, no?

Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.

From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note.... The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking.

I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience. It's part of the test and I don't have a problem with it.

I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.

I am not a huge follower of music and tend to like one CD and play it to death, usually when I am washing up.

I am what I photograph.

I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.

I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it's the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don't find it easy. I don't announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone's photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it's the one thing that gives the game away. I don't try and hide what I'm doing - that would be folly.

I have been photographing people dancing for 20 or 30 years now, and I think I will eventually do a book of dancing photos.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.

I try to photograph my own and society's hypocrisy.

In 1982 I bought the newly released Makina Plaubel 55mm fixed-lens camera. With this shift from 35mm to 6 x 7, I also changed from black and white to color. Later that year, I started my project on New Brighton called The Last Resort. However, the first project I shot in colour was composed of urban scenes from Liverpool. This image was on the second roll of film. It's the first good photo I made in this new chapter of my work.

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

My black-and-white work is more of a celebration and the color work became more of a critique of society.

Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically. On the other hand, you still have the option of controlling every technical aspect. It's the most accessible, democratic medium available in the world.

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.

Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems.

The danger is, you have a formula and you just repeat it.

The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you're trying to say and express.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Unless it hurts, unless there's some vulnerability there, I don't think you're going to get good photographs.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

When a mother takes pictures of her children on the beach, she doesn't take herself for an artist; she does it for love, which is an excellent reason, from my point of view.

When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Work harder, get closer and be passionate about what you photograph.

You can read a lot about a country by looking at its beaches: across cultures, the beach is that rare public space in which all absurdities and quirky national behaviors can be found,

You can't learn passion, either you've got it or you haven't.

You have to take a lot of bad pictures. Dont' be afraid to take bad pictures... You have to take a lot of bad pictures in order to know when you've got a good one.