Marilyn Monroe with glasses, from the private collection of Martin Parr
FLEA market finds form Martin Parr’s exhibition, Painted Photographs, at the Open Eye Gallery.
Celebrity faces smile out of press prints and publicity photographs marked up by newspapers or magazines to improve their reproduction or indicate areas for cropping.
Featuring stars such as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, they show how images of celebrities were refined and manipulated in the days before Photoshop.
Parr, who is best known locally for his 1986 collection, Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, said the surreal nature of the images first drew him to collect them.
“It’s purely an intuitive attraction, not intellectual,” he says.
“I first came across them about 10 years ago and I’ve been picking them up ever since – mostly in America.”
PAINTED Photographs is at the Open Eye from January 13 to March 18.
