The typical Martin Parr
It's difficult to know what characterises a Martin Parr photograph, as my own language has built up over the years. But there are certain subjects and ideas that I've been interested in which have re-occurred. I guess you could say they're brightly coloured, they're accessible. I present my work in different ways and forms and people either take it or leave it.

Provoking a reaction
I'm rather surprised when I do provoke a reaction. The photographs seem to me very obvious and need to be done and when you finally present them to the public, they're deemed to be controversial. It's not something I've actually sought out directly. I just do the work I want to do, which is intuitively based and then bring it to the public. If it becomes controversial, then fine, it seems to do me no harm.

Weddings
I think that photography has a lot of baggage and part of that baggage is the expectations of what people should photograph, both in a professional and in an amateur sense. It's very strange, for example, when you think of a wedding. Everyone knows that you're meant to take lots of photographs at a wedding and cameras abound, whereas no one would ever dream of taking a camera to a funeral.

Funerals
There's no reason why a funeral is a less important event, in terms of social meaning, than a wedding, but there's just a tradition that one should take photographs at a wedding and not at a funeral.

Now if you look around at professional work, you'll often see that there're certain things again which are assumed to be ideal subject matter, whether its old cities or churches or perhaps even in documentary photography, such as circuses, or mental hospitals. Things which are very visually dynamic often get photographed, not because people think these are important things to record, but because inherently the subject matter is very attractive.

Sunsets (yawn)
There is a set of images we have in our mind, almost sub-conscious, that are accepted as being the usual subject matters for photography and I think that when people see something that overlaps, they actually go and take it and think they've actually achieved some contribution towards photography.

But if you analyse a lot of these pictures, they do show the same old scenes again and it gets very tiresome, for example sunsets. I mean sunsets are very beautiful, so people automatically assume they should do a nice photograph of a sunset, but we don't need any more photographs of sunsets. What we need is more intelligent ways of looking at the world that tell us something unexpected rather than something we knew before.

So part of my agenda has been to try and re-examine some of the ideas of what territories can be photographed, so I've ended up photographing in supermarkets for example, because I think they can tell us as much about the times that we live in as the more expected subjects.

Think of England
In my book Think of England, I've tried to build up almost like a set of cliches based around this idea of what people think England might be like. But I've somewhat subverted them to a certain extent and also I've looked at the extremes, my own prejudices, things that I like in England, and things I actually find more offensive. And that's partly where photography can be a very therapeutic process and I think this is a very usual aspect of photography. So building these little sort of fictions if you like (I do call them fictions, because I've exaggerated the colour), I've been very subjective in choosing certain things to photograph. By putting them together you create a narrative, and this narrative ultimately points you towards the ambiguity, which is I imagine, something else that other people feel and share.

The Last Resort
I've been working as a photographer for 30 years and I've done maybe 17 books but in the end there's probably two to three of these which I think really have worked, such as The Last Resort.

For me, The Last Resort was the excitement of discovering colour. It was the excitement of understanding and depicting this very run-down sea-side resort at the height of Thatcherism. It felt socially and politically the right thing to do.

Common Sense
My book Common Sense is about the 90s. It's about the flotsam and jetsam of our consumer society and this was a sort of very beautiful lyrical way of illustrating in fact a lot of junk and trash. It's peculiar that you can combine this idea of our junk culture and make it look beautiful by sort of showing the bliss of the holidays, the high intensity of the colours that people use. It managed to bring these two strands together so for me.

Populism and elitism
At heart I'm a populist. I try and take pictures which hopefully can find a wide audience but at the same time I enjoy the elitist audience of the art market. I feel most happy about publishing a book. I think this is a very good vehicle for photography. It works very well - you can look through it at your own pace, you have a full statement there and to me it's a perfect vehicle for placing photographs.

In black and white
Originally, I took my pictures in black and white and then moved to colour in the '80s. The thing about black and white pictures is that people expect the photographs to be done in black and white, because it then tells a viewer that these are very serious pictures about a very serious subject. I want my pictures to be almost indiscernible in terms of colour and vitality and energy from advertising or commercial images. If you look back at imagery from the '30s and '40s and you think of the advertising, it tells us so much about those times. So in fact by default, advertising is probably more documentary in terms of its value of information about the times that we live in, than documentary photography, which is a very strange thing.

How to make a great picture
It's always very difficult to analyse what makes a good photograph. The moment you feel you've actually understood how to go out and take a good photograph, you might as well give up, because it's such a baffling, difficult thing to do. Sometimes great photographs come almost innocently and naively.

Camera, technique, and early rising
I think that all the people selling cameras and films almost like to intimidate its audience into thinking that photography is actually quite difficult. The great thing about modern technology is that we can now get an extremely good picture just with point and shoot technology. So what it means though is that people have to think about what they're photographing more.

In the end what you photograph is really the crucial thing and indeed how you photograph and the relationship you build up with you subject. The person that does landscape photography seriously is going to be the person that's going to be up early in the morning and out there late at night, getting the different and interesting light. Once you connect with your subject the pictures will start to roll.

The still image
Unlike film or television you can get a single image which can become an icon. When you look back at some of the world's most famous photographs, they'll instantly remind you of say the Vietnam war or some big event. The photograph has this ability to produce a single picture which can sum up a particular idea, social movement or world event which is something perhaps film or television cannot even do.

The things I photograph tend to be very ordinary, therefore they don't need to be summed up in a dramatic way, like say a picture from the Vietnam war. But I understand also that by putting bodies of work together, you can talk about the time that we live in, and that's one of the things I'm very interested in doing.

An image less ordinary
One of the things that I've learnt over the years is that things that we often take for granted can often make the most interesting photographs. There's this expectation that photographers should go to somewhere extraordinary for example. Most people always take their cameras on holiday because they're doing something different from what they normally do. In fact, perhaps the greatest insight they would have, would be in the area or the knowledge of their town.