Martin Parr is one of Britain's best-known contemporary photographers, with a broad international following, and President of Magnum, the world-famous photo agency. He has published widely and exhibited internationally, including a retrospective of his work in 2002, run by the Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum, and a major exhibition currently curated by him at the Science Museum: 'Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr'. His publications include influential photo-books such as The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton (1996), Small World (1995), and Think of England (2005). Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist, and broadcaster. As a journalist he covered major events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. He is the author of Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (2010), The Professor and the Madman (1999), The Map that Changed the World (2001), and A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005), all of which have been New York Times bestsellers.
There are more than 100 photographs which together evoke a strong sense of place and the ordinariness of the people inhabiting it. * Katie Law, Evening Standard * In Oxford the celebrated photographer Martin Parr has gathered a set of 118 plates of Oxford scenes and characters, accompanied by a reminiscence of student life in the 1960s by Simon Winchester, and beautifully published by Oxford University Press... eye-catching and stimulating. * Revd. Dr. Martin Wellings, Methodist Recorder Vol.17 * Martin Parr's star has never been higher. * Geoff Harris, Amateur Photographer * Parr is often accused of mocking his subject matter, but while containing the occasional quirk, this is a largely straight documentation of a subject that already happily embraces moments of absurdity with great seriousness. * Eliza Williams, Creative Review *