Martin Parr

Martin Parr, originally uploaded by Wesley Danes.

After finishing grad school, I went to London for a bit to intern with Martin Parr. As kind and generous a person as I've ever met, Martin showed up at the office now and then to offer gifts to the staff (three of us). What do you want, he'd ask me, to which I always replied, It's A Small World, the original one! To which he'd always say, what BESIDES that? (The original is out of print and super collectible and muey expensive).

He agreed to look through my images, and the genius of Martin is that he sort of tricks you into critiquing your own work. Everything is in the form of a question, and pretty soon you realize you had already had the answers you were looking for.

After seeing my photos, he showed up in the office the next time with a copy of Rinko Kawauuchi's 'Aila' book for me. He handed it to me, and said, "She's a GENIUS." He was right. Aila is fantastic, hard to get ahold of, and highly recommended.

Parr is an uber photography book collector, and his Bristol home is apparently filled to the gills with photo books. "You can't see the walls, because it's stacks of books, everywhere," his assistant, Conor, told me.

My assignment, during my three months there, was to catalog every single negative in Parr's massive collection. If you know how prolific this guy is, this was a task to say the least. I sort of guffawed at the undertaking. The best part was in witnessing his process. Parr doesn't take one picture of anything. He's a monster of taking everything from every possible angle, in every way he can imagine. The other super magical thing about seeing his work in this form was seeing the beginnings of his relationship with his wife. All these images, unseen by even the most avid collector, but seen by me (how lucky I am!) were photographs of them falling in love. You could see it in the way he photographed her, and in her return gaze. Magic.

The other crazy thing I found were several photographs of a friend of mine at Paris Las Vegas. She and I had worked together there for two years; she'd even helped me get my next job at Mandalay. I'd never even known she'd met Martin, let alone been photographed by him. There I'd been, waitressing in a coffee shop in horrific faux Paris, one degree of separation from the great Parr, with no knowledge of it whatsoever. Weird, sometimes everything's soooo Kevin Bacon.