The China Mail - 'We're all too rich,' says photo legend Martin Parr

"The state we're all in is appalling," said the 73-year-old, known for his humorous snapshots of bronzed beachgoers and selfie-snapping holidaymakers.

"We're all too rich. We're consuming all these things in the world," he said, referring to tourists increasingly jumping on planes and mobbing European cities like Venice or Rome.

"And we can't. It's unsustainable. This joke about going to net zero (carbon emissions), it's never going to happen," he told AFP in Paris on a visit to promote his autobiography.

Parr's latest book, a collection of photographs together with his wry commentary, is called "Utterly Lazy and Inattentive", after a French teacher's damning school report when he was 14.

It charts his journey from son of a birdwatching father to professional photographer with a sharp eye for mundane oddities.

Among the photos selected for the work, there is the first McDonald's drive-through in Ireland in 1986, the toilets of a Masonic Lodge in London in 2001 and an adult clutching a Donald Trump doll in 2016, before his first election.

Parr has travelled the globe, snapping images in North Korea, Albania, Japan and Russia among other places.

He would have liked to visit Iran, he said, but the authorities never granted him a visa.

But Parr's frontline, he says, will always be the likes of the supermarket.

Everyday places of consumption are still relevant in 2025, adds the member of the prestigious Magnum agency, "because they change all the time".

"Now you don't actually have to go to the till. You just walk out," he said, alluding to shops where a tracking system charges consumers directly.

- AI-generated biography? -

Parr's autobiography spans from a time spotting steam trains to Tesla electric cars. But he said the single biggest societal change in his lifetime has been the advent of smartphones.

"I think smartphones made a huge difference to things like tourism, what people do" and how they respond to reality, he said.

He said the purpose of visiting any tourist landmark these days seemed to be almost solely about taking a photo, not seeing the site itself.

"You collect points, like you would collect points towards a toy or a game," added the photographer, whose more than 100 publications include a book called "Death by Selfie".

Parr said he found artificial intelligence less troublesome.

"I've seen AI interpretations of my work. They're horrible," he said. "Gaudy colours, just a mess."

"It will get better but it doesn't worry me at all," he added.

He is not impressed either with computer-generated text.

While promoting his autobiography, he has seen books about him pop up online that he says he has nothing to do with.

"They're all AI-generated, printed digitally -- horrible, generally speaking," he said.

AFP spotted one biography written by an unknown author, with a title 17 words long and a poorly written description on a US website, and Parr confirmed he had bought it.

"I'm collecting them just for the hell of it," he said.

N.Wan--ThChM