At 30, I was already making a living from photography and I thought my references were quite clear. The majority were portrait and fashion photographers who published in magazines such as The face either IDENTIFIER. Until then, perhaps out of pure ignorance, I had no connection with the documentary photography that I saw in books and newspapers, I associated it with a very serious language, a little rigid and almost always in black and white.
This prejudice collapsed the day a book fell into my hands and left me upside down: The last resortMartin Parr’s New Brighton series, a study of the British working class on holiday. I had never seen anything like it: a color so delicious that it stuck to the retina; a new and courageous language, raw and above all full of humor. There was something both generous and witty in his gaze.
That year I spent a few months in London with my partner. We thought that everything new was happening there and, even though we weren’t talking about it yet madwe wanted to not miss anything: whole days spent between photos and vinyls, and even more intense nights, in full immersion in what we then called club culture.
Among everything we experienced then, there is an anecdote that stuck in my mind and which is today part of my book Shots counted (Anagram, 2025). It starts with aversion.
One of the reasons for our trip was to visit the Martin Parr exhibition at the Barbican Centre, but on the morning of the opening we experienced a twist: someone had taken the wallet in which we kept almost all the money.
The prospect of returning to Barcelona directly to the starting point weighed on us, but we decided to go see the exhibition anyway. We thought that at least the energy released by his images would help us better digest the shock.
Call it cosmic justice or mere coincidence, but just as we were leaving, with the catalog purchased with the little we had left and which we had just put in our bag, a small group of people stopped us in the middle of the street: they were the creative team for a Cadbury chocolate campaign that Martin Parr was photographing at the same time.
Since the scene didn’t really suit the protagonists – two stunning professional models who didn’t know each other and had no chemistry – Parr decided to stop the session and this time go out looking for a real couple on the street.
The plan was simple, it was well paid and, what’s more, it was in cash: all you had to do was kiss in the sun on the grass of a park while the chocolate melted.
He barely spoke and seemed in no hurry. He respected the little breaks we took. While he was filming, I watched the scene, half-opening one eye so as not to miss anything.
Seeing him work with this astonishing simplicity and this very broad smile during the session, where everything happened in the simplest and most natural way possible, was a gift. All this was very far from the artifice with which I had previously associated advertising.
Despite the deployment in production (clients, agency and team), he manages perfectly alone, with the flash recorded on his modest camera. He ended up refusing help from the professional models, stylists and makeup artists who were waiting sitting in the corner. All that was left was someone as “product” to reconstitute the chocolates, which dissolved in a minute while our long kiss lasted.
It was the best master class that I have ever received. Simplifying and focusing energy on what really matters was key. The client understood that for the campaign to exude authenticity, he had to accept that Parr imposed his documentary gaze. To do this, he eliminated almost all the paraphernalia that surrounded him, opting for the couple, the hairstyle, the clothes…, everything was authentic and nothing was fake.
That day changed the way I understood my work. I learned that it was possible to be called upon to do what you know how to do well without betraying your codes, and that this respect began with yourself: you had to earn it. Since then, I have always tried to keep his point of view in mind: even in the most commercial mission, you must always leave room for honesty.
A few weeks later, once back, the campaign took to the streets. English friends started sending us photos of the kiss on buses, on billboards and on the subway. Every time I opened one, I remembered him and his good work.
Parr, who died Saturday at the age of 73, argued that truth was subjective, but he wanted to emphasize certain universal truths. He depicted the world as he found it. At a time of information saturation and fake news, this idea of truth, however minimal it may be, takes on another dimension.
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