“The country of the tourist pamphlet,” Nadine Gordimer wrote in “A World of Strangers,” “always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.” In his book “Small World,” Martin Parr presents that grubby finger-print in full, gaudy color. First released in 1996, “Small World” is a collection of Parr’s photos of tourists—many of them in the process of taking photos themselves—at cluttered travel destinations the world over.
In 2007, Dewi Lewis published a new edition of “Small World,” adding more recent pictures from Venice, Prague, and elsewhere. Here’s a selection; my brief interrogation of Mr. Parr follows.
Did you travel to all these places primarily to shoot this series, or were these photos that you took while you were working on other assignments?
I travelled expressly to take these photos. That’s the only way to do it.
Where did the idea for this book originate?
Tourism is the biggest industry in the world. I’m interested in the great conundrum, the contradiction between the mythology of these places and the reality. And if you want to photograph people, there’s no better place to go than tourist sites. You just put the honey pot in front of them and go to work.
Do you have a favorite of these photos?
No. I never think of photographs as being individual. Always as a group.
Do you imagine you’ll do a third edition of “Small World” at some point, adding photos you’ve taken since the latest book?
It’s not out of the question. Tourism is something I constantly come back to. It doesn’t get smaller; it only gets bigger.
Would you say that critics largely understood what you were going for with this book?
I would say that critics didn’t pay much attention to it. Photography is still rather marginal.
