Spotlight on…
Martin Parr discusses some of the key photographs seen in his most recent book
‘Beach Therapy’ with Martin Parr
So this is the Beach Therapy project where I’ve taken the telephoto lens and explored the beach. Over my career, I’ve used the beach as my experimental lab, first in black and white; and then, when
I moved to colour in the mid-1980s, I did The Last Resort, where I used a medium-format camera with flash.
Then I went and bought a macro lens and a ring flash and came in much closer, got the beach right close up. And when I switched to digital, looking back at the beach, coming back even further by using the telephoto lens, I went out and bought a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS USM to go with my EOS 5D, and just started to see what was possible with a telephoto.
The 70-300mm is not a lens that is used that much in documentary photography, so I wanted to see if I could explore the different kind of language it offered me. You’re fighting to give yourself a challenge, to see if you can conquer this type of lens and make your pictures look slightly different.
St Ives, 2017 (right)
This is the picture that’s on the cover of the book, taken in St Ives. I do a lot of work in St Ives, because you can look down on a lot of the beaches, and I loved this very windy day when the surf was really bubbling. I felt that picking out all these Lowry-esque figures on the beach worked very well. This is the beach that’s in front of the Tate Gallery in St Ives. I love St Ives, I love Tenby: they’re two of my favourite seaside resorts.
Tenby, 2016 (above) We have an apartment in Tenby, so I often go there. You get fantastic beaches, and the views to explore the silhouettes of people, as is the case here. This big rock has quite a presence.
I could almost have photographed this from my living room, but I didn’t because I was actually out there experimenting, seeing what’s there with the beach, seeing the shapes of what emerges. Tenby, 2018 (opposite, top)
This is a shot I took last year, and it’s the big favourite now… Here you have an orderly queue on the beach in Tenby – you even have these little people on the edges, to balance the picture.
And you have a child about to join the queue, obviously very organised: it’s the one thing we do very well in Britain. We’re very good queuers – because queues are such a British institution if you like, and here they are queueing for the ice cream. What’s not to like? Broadstairs, Isle of Thanet, 2014 (opposite, bottom) One of the things with a telephoto lens, of course, is that it has a very narrow depth of field, and I’ve explored that. Here’s a picture taken at Broadstairs, another of my favourite resorts. Here I’m just experimenting with how the seagull looks out of focus – and here I think it’s just the right amount of focus – and then there’s this whole congregation of people on the beach.
The square shape in the sea is a pool – as the tide comes out, this will remain full, a minor swimming pool people can use, and here it’s getting near the high tide. But later on, people will be walking around this and going in for a swim, so they don’t have to tramp right out to low tide.
I like the idea of using the vegetation in the foreground and often throwing it out of focus, then dealing with all the noise behind it. It’s quite an anarchic picture, and you can explore playing with these two planes in a photo. I find that people generally tend to use one focus plane, so I like the idea of combining the beach being in focus, and the foreground being out of focus, a bit like the seagull is here.
This is all part of the fun of exploring new possibilities with the lens. If I put this into a camera club competition, I’d come last. The judge would say this is absolute rubbish, and that’s the great thing about it – it breaks the rules but I still think it works as a picture.
“If I put this shot into a camera club competition, I’d come last. The judge would say it was absolute rubbish, and that’s the great thing about it” Martin Parr
“This is where the classic case of compression offered by a telephoto lens really kicks in” Martin Parr
Sorrento, 2014 (above) This is in Sorrento in Italy, which I particularly like. What I like about it is that it’s a very sunny day and it’s always in shadow, and the cliff is above it. So this is literally looking straight down onto the beach with a telephoto, and I’m just searching for that little bit of focus.
You need a story. I love this couple here, in the middle, and they’re really the feature. All around it we have this other stuff, and the sand is dark, which I quite like as well: it means the towels start jumping out at you.
Yes, it does look like a drone shot… literally looking straight down. There will be a slight angle, though, looking down at that angle rather than 90º. Grandé Beach, Mar del Plata, 2014 (opposite page, top) This is a great use of compression. According to my research, the biggest beach in the world is Mar del Plata in Argentina. It has 17 beaches, 2,000 hotels and is absolutely huge, so you have different types of beach to visit. This is the beach where all the young kids go, and you can see just how busy it is. And of course, this is where the classic case of compression offered by a telephoto lens really kicks in.
This image was on display at my OnlyHuman show at the National Portrait Gallery, printed four metres high. The actual focus plane is about two thirds of the way up from the bottom.
In the book, this image doesn’t look out of focus, but if you saw it blown up to 4m at the NPG, you would have seen that it’s really unsharp. The print quality you can get from digital images is unbelievable, though. Benidorm, 2014 (opposite page, bottom) And here, this is again using the foreground, at another favourite resort of mine. Benidorm is known as being a British and German resort, but most of the people who go there are Spanish. And they do this amazing thing where they parade in the morning on the hard shoulder, the hard sand between the high and the low tide.
If you’re there in the summer between 09.30 and 12.30, it’s actually very busy – people just walk up and down this beach so it’s like a motorway. I was keeping the motorway in focus, as well as the array of hats and beach clobber. It’s interesting to see how things look when they get out of focus – I took this shot 200 times and this is the one that worked.
The people at the front are walking so I just pre-focused and watched them fall into the frame. And of course, in the camera itself they looked even more out of focus than they actually were.