Martin Parr teams up with Gucci to capture its new watch campaign

We are all familiar with the vivid snapshots of Martin Parr; whose candid photographs capture the heart of every place he visits. The prolific photographer has been commissioned by Gucci to undertake his first major fashion campaign, #TimetoParr, which features the fashion house’s timeless watches. The series launches today on Instagram and captures subjects in nine locations around the globe; Asia, Italy, the UK and the US, featuring them in natural moments that emphasise everyday life. Parr captures the watches deftly and artistically, in angles and situations not typical of traditional fashion photography.

Parr tells Dazed, “with the shoot only comprising of watches it took some time to work out how to make an interesting picture — you have to be quite close to them to show all the details, and the surroundings can’t detract from them”. The photographer used locals, tourists and passersby as his models, and as we can observe, their interaction with the location forms the narrative for the images.

In a piazza, in Florence, a woman is photographed feeding the pigeons, a bird frozen in mid-flight, the timeless red and green stripe of the watch bright against the neutral background. As written on the Gucci website, “what Martin Parr sees in Italy is a harmonious clash between the old and new, slow and fast, local and global. What seems stylish and what seems ugly may be flipped at will”. This notion can be seen in these images; fashion is mixed with the banal to create something beautiful.