At Manchester Art Gallery, we don’t produce catalogues for every exhibition, but we knew a book on the photographer Martin Parr would be popular. So I approached Alan Ward from Axis Design to design a catalogue. I trusted his expertise – he has a sensibility for photography and knew both the artist’s work and our requirements.
The exhibition is a collection of Parr’s Manchester photography from when he was a student here in 1970-73 to the present day, including a new commission capturing Manchester and its people in 2018. Ward recommended a couple of landscape formats with sample spreads to illustrate them and we calculated how many pages would be needed. We decided a large format hardback would be most appropriate for the definitive book of Parr’s Manchester work.
We arranged the book chronologically and gave the second half over to the new work. Over the course of the publication, you see Parr’s work develop from black and white (the domain of the serious photographer in the 1970s), to colour in the 1980s, to digital in the 2000s.
Ward developed a design grid and began work on sequencing, while I wrote the short texts that introduce each body of work. The book opens with a text from Parr that describes his experience of Manchester over the past 45 years and his reflections on how the city has changed.
We met to discuss the ebb and flow of the sequencing and to review how the images were working. This discussion then informed aspects of the gallery hang. Although it is an exhibition catalogue, it is very much a book in its own right, one that explores repeated themes and colour throughout Parr’s photography.
For the cover, we wanted a new colour work on the front and an earlier black-and-white photo on the back to give a sense of the scope of the exhibition. We chose a stand-out image of Mackie Mayor – a newly refurbished Victorian market hall full of artisan food stalls – to represent contemporary Manchester and a photograph of Yates’s Wine Lodge to show drinking and socialising in the early 1980s.
The catalogue was printed at Graphius in Belgium because of their expertise in book printing and in pre-press colour management for black-and-white and colour photography. Ward oversaw it on press, using colour proofs approved by Parr’s studio.
This handsome book is testament to our collaborative process and we are thrilled by the public’s reaction to it.
Natasha Howes is the senior curator at Manchester Art Gallery. Written in collaboration with Alan Ward of Axis Design. Martin Parr: Return to Manchester is on at Manchester Art Gallery until 22 April
The exhibition is a collection of Parr’s Manchester photography from when he was a student here in 1970-73 to the present day, including a new commission capturing Manchester and its people in 2018. Ward recommended a couple of landscape formats with sample spreads to illustrate them and we calculated how many pages would be needed. We decided a large format hardback would be most appropriate for the definitive book of Parr’s Manchester work.
We arranged the book chronologically and gave the second half over to the new work. Over the course of the publication, you see Parr’s work develop from black and white (the domain of the serious photographer in the 1970s), to colour in the 1980s, to digital in the 2000s.
Ward developed a design grid and began work on sequencing, while I wrote the short texts that introduce each body of work. The book opens with a text from Parr that describes his experience of Manchester over the past 45 years and his reflections on how the city has changed.
We met to discuss the ebb and flow of the sequencing and to review how the images were working. This discussion then informed aspects of the gallery hang. Although it is an exhibition catalogue, it is very much a book in its own right, one that explores repeated themes and colour throughout Parr’s photography.
For the cover, we wanted a new colour work on the front and an earlier black-and-white photo on the back to give a sense of the scope of the exhibition. We chose a stand-out image of Mackie Mayor – a newly refurbished Victorian market hall full of artisan food stalls – to represent contemporary Manchester and a photograph of Yates’s Wine Lodge to show drinking and socialising in the early 1980s.
The catalogue was printed at Graphius in Belgium because of their expertise in book printing and in pre-press colour management for black-and-white and colour photography. Ward oversaw it on press, using colour proofs approved by Parr’s studio.
This handsome book is testament to our collaborative process and we are thrilled by the public’s reaction to it.
Natasha Howes is the senior curator at Manchester Art Gallery. Written in collaboration with Alan Ward of Axis Design. Martin Parr: Return to Manchester is on at Manchester Art Gallery until 22 April
Manchester Art Gallery, £25, ISBN 978-090-1673978
