Martin Parr and Maya Golyshkina both picked up photography before the age of 16. Perhaps that’s why a sense of childlike wonder has survived in both of their practices, regardless of their considerable age gap. Parr’s flash-drenched and adrenaline-spiking lens has left us with decades of images that capture both the humor and tragic banality of the human condition. At 73, his work as an architect of contemporary photography is far from finished; recent projects have taken him everywhere from Glastonbury to Kyoto.
For this issue, he made a new friend, visiting Golyshkina—a 24-year-old creative juggernaut from Moscow who has already made her name with collaborations of the highest brow (Balenciaga, Margiela, Prada, to name a few)—in her London home. The artist gave Parr a tour of her latest wearable creations, crafted from the most malleable of everyday materials: cardboard. After getting a glimpse inside each other’s minds during their collaborative shoot that day, the shutterbugs reunited for a far-reaching discussion of the medium that has kept them captivated.
CULTURED: How do you both incorporate play or spontaneity into your work?
Maya Golyshkina: I embrace the unexpected by allowing my materials and surroundings to guide me, whether it’s a roll of toilet paper, cardboard, or just my room. The elements usually dictate the direction of the piece, and foster an environment where playfulness thrives for me.
Martin Parr: I feel my approach is pretty intuitive because I’ve done photography for a long time. You see something in front of you, you know when it’s gonna work, and you know when you need to change it to make it work. I keep saying what an easy, nice job this [shoot] was.
Golyshkina: I’d been working on these pieces for around two weeks, actually, so it wasn’t that easy for me. [Laughs] But the shoot itself was fast. Usually, I play it by ear, so I don’t have any ideas or results in my head right away. I really like playing around, and I think that’s how we elevate our work.
CULTURED: Do you have a non-traditional material or a tool in your practices that stands out as an unexpected success?
Parr: Gosh, I’ve done some pretty wacky projects over the years. I did a project on bored couples, which a lot of people like. I did a project that looked at Japanese commuters from above on the train. That got quite a big following and was a bit surprising.
Golyshkina: Using household objects was very unusual, maybe, for some people, but I didn’t find it that unique. Martin, you haven’t seen this, but I also do crying videos: self-portraits where I use different objects as my tears. They went quite viral. I would place eggs on my eyes and then crack them and pretend I’m crying.
CULTURED: How has social media affected how you work?
Parr: It’s a pretty important connection we have. I think [the Martin Parr Foundation is] up to like 77,000 now, so we’re on a good course. We won’t be satisfied until we get to a million.
Golyshkina: I’ll help you! For me, the Internet is the main connection for my practice. It has completely changed my life, because it brought me to London. I’m Gen Z, and I grew up with my phone. I was just posting [my self-portraits] randomly to my Instagram page, which is how I became quite viral and then brands and people would reach out to me … Imagine being from Russia [where] there is no art or fashion industry, and no one appreciates your work. My phone was the biggest tool in my art career: It helped me show my work to an audience worldwide.
CULTURED: When you are experiencing a creative block, do you have a reliable solution, somewhere you look?
Parr: I don’t have blocks, it’s as simple as that, because there’s so much crazy stuff out in the world. I like to be photographing; I can never do enough.
Golyshkina: I think this is the main point of being an artist, because if I had restrictions or blocks, I would rather go and work at McDonald’s or something and do a normal job. But I decided to be an artist.
CULTURED: In that case, if you are trying to keep up with the rate of what you see and what you want to photograph, what does that look like to you?
Parr: In some shape or form, I’m usually working every day. I may have a bit of quiet time on weekends, occasionally, but during the week, I’m always down here. I’m obsessed. My work, my life, it’s all one thing, really. If you weren’t obsessed, you wouldn’t be a good artist.
Golyshkina: Yeah, I agree. This is actually how I live: doing experiments, calling, meeting people, doing interviews. I’m obsessed with what I do, and I can’t imagine my life without it.
CULTURED: When you’re shooting a subject, how do you envision capturing someone’s personality in a photo?
Parr: You have to stop people from smiling too much, because that always makes everything look quite the same. So that’s the first thing to do. In the case of Maya, it’s much simpler because it’s just a question of her putting her face through the hole, and she, of course, didn’t smile, because we’re taking this very seriously. She knows that not smiling is funnier.
Golyshkina: I always want to look so natural or even ugly and unusual, because I don’t want to think about something fake when I work. I don’t want to restrict myself or think, Oh, I need to pose now.
CULTURED: Maya, what was it like having someone else step into that photographer role, since you’re usually doing a lot of self-portraits?
Golyshkina: It’s quite unusual, to be honest, because I usually control the process. But if the photographer is as good as Martin, I trust and feel like my work and my style can be elevated. Then it’s more like Martin’s world now than just mine. It’s not just my lens—it’s something in between.
in your life?
