Martin Parr's Stunning Final Vogue Shoot: A Fashion Extravaganza in the Italian Alps

I​​n 1994, a meeting to consider Martin Parr’s membership of the photo agency Magnum quickly became the stuff of modern photographic legend. Philip Jones Griffiths, veteran of the Vietnam War, was incandescent. “His photographs titillate in some way but the fact is they are utterly meaningless,” he thundered, while further reproaching Parr for “kicking the victims of Tory violence.” After viewing a show of his pictures, Henri Cartier-Bresson, a surviving founder of Magnum at 86, was equally blunt: “I have only one thing to say to you. You are from a completely different planet to me.” On reflection, though, after he had got in by a single vote, Parr took Cartier-Bresson’s words as something of a compliment. Being completely from a different planet had always been his calling card. Since he first picked up a camera and exposed a few frames—his first photo essay, as a 16-year-old, was four snapshots of Harry Ramsden’s fish and chip shop outside Leeds—Parr scrutinized the world around him with a deadpan bemusement, as if planet Earth really were a final frontier, remote, unmapped, and he a latter-day Prospero, inviting us to marvel at its wonders or to shrink from its curious improbabilities. For Magnum, the terrestrial landscape was cratered with war and famine and catastrophe; for Parr, the front line was a new one, one more immediately to hand: “I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket…” He dared to be dull. It was probably The Last Resort (1986), his full-throttle color document of a working-class caught in the downside swell of the Thatcher years, but finding pleasure where it could—in this case, the litter-strewn, defeated seaside resort of New Brighton, Merseyside—that made his reputation, for good or bad. His detractors flung it all at him: cynicism, fascism, opportunism, voyeurism, snobbishness. But an imperturbable Parr, rarely troubled by self-doubt, was working up a grander vision: “I just like to show the world as it is, with all its foibles and ambiguities.” And not far from the surface (though sometimes you had to scratch hard) was a profound sympathy for the human condition not so far removed from Cartier-Bresson’s lofty ideals, just differently expressed. In 2013, Martin Parr became president of Magnum. He had spent half a lifetime as a documentary photographer before making his mark on the fashion world. Why did it take him so long? For a photographer with such a discriminating gaze and a well-honed sense of deconstructive irony, surely this had offered up before now any number of rites and rituals to pick apart. High-concept absurdities to street-level realities and all the fickleness in between, he navigated it with skill. “I love playing the game of fashion photography without knowing what the rules are,” he said. He didn’t shatter the crystal or puncture any egos, a disinclination perhaps to bite the hand then feeding him—Gucci, Paul Smith, and Balenciaga were clients—but he was anyway incorruptible. He grew, I think, to like it for all its contradictions; it was self-evidently amusing and he made new friends along the way. “Everyone wanted to work with Martin. You saw him on moodboards everywhere. And he was fun!” says fashion editor Ursina Gysi. As a quietly spoken, nondescript Englishman—he dressed, as someone once said, like a junior accountant—it was entirely possible to be both cynical and affectionate at the same time. Parr published a memoir last September, written with Wendy Jones. He called it Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr in Words and Pictures, its title taken from a long-ago school report (Surbiton County Grammar; he barely scraped into that, too). He had been working on it for 15 years, but sped it up as if he knew there was not much time left. Although he had been ill for a while, Parr’s death in December, at 73, was unexpected, the pictures on this page his last fashion assignment: a Vogue Italia portfolio in advance of the Winter Olympics, taking place next month across the Alpine belt of Lombardy and northeast Italy. They are quite possibly the last he took, as he died barely two days later. “He knew exactly what he wanted,” says Gysi. “His eye was so sharp. Ten clicks of the shutter and he’d got it. I was so lucky to work with him. He was just so true to himself, so authentic. The still lifes we shot were all his own ideas, and very much mapped out beforehand, and so quirky. He was brave to be up in the mountains. You know, I think he rather enjoyed the chaos that comes with all this…” Although relatively new to our own solar system, Martin Parr was much loved at British Vogue, as well. “His eye was our collective eye,” says model Karen Elson, who worked with him on several occasions. “Where others saw tacky, gaudy, and unpolished, he saw beauty.” In 2020 he made one of the most unlikely of cover images, his first and last for British Vogue: a spring lamb standing on a mound of spoil next to the A96 out of Aberdeen. Inexplicable, really, but somehow unimprovable. How like the man. Photographs: Martin Parr. Models: Marta Freccia, Cala Moragas, Cheikh Diakhate, Alessio Pozzi. Styling: Ursina Gysi. Hair: Paolo Soffiatti. Make-up: Stephanie Kunz. Set design: Viola Vitali. Photo assistant: Nathan Vidler. Stylist assistant: Camilla Chiarolanza. Hair assistant: Giacomo Selvaggio. Make-up assistant: Giulia Sterza. Set design assistant: Giulia Del Bello. Production: Squalo Produzioni. Location: Sunny Valley Kelo Mountain Lodge. With thanks to Carlota Ruiz de Velasco.