Tony Ray-Jones & Martin Parr

I had never realised the debt that Martin Parr owed to Tony Ray-Jones, a photographer who died of leukaemia when aged just 30 in 1972.

Ray-Jones was a brilliant documentary photographer who often packed huge complexity into his observational photographs. The top image is by him and was taken at Eastbourne in 1968. Close inspection will reveal several narratives within the one image.

Parr is famous today for his highly saturated colour photos of the British at leisure, but earlier in his career he took black and white photos that were very reminiscent of Ray-Jones’ work. The second photo is a good example - showing the besuited Tom Greenwood cleaning in 1976.

But even Parr’s later colour-saturated images are strongly evocative of Ray-Jones. His famous seaside photos have strong echoes of his predecessor’s Eastbourne picture - capturing the quirky side of life and including different narratives within the same frame.


All these images entertain with their quirkiness, but also invite the mind to analyse the narrative, In addition, the photographers use compositional techniques to stress parts of the narrative - Ray-Jones using the rule of thirds to draw attention to the pram and the cowboy hat, for example.

Read a Guardian article discussing a Science Museum exhibition of the pair’s work.