INTRODUCING EMMA PARRY
I am currently based in Leeds in England, how does it feel to live here? Its a bit like when you put your ruler on the desk and you cant pick it up, because its just constantly sliding around. It’s just completely 30cm shatter proof. I have lived and flopped around for 20ish years. My first memory of wanting a camera and taking photos was when i was about 8 or 9, it was a little plastic fugii 35mm camera with an awful orange cow print over it, and my mum said she’d buy it for me if I would stop itching my eczema. This camera was my pride and joy, and I took it everywhere and still have the original prints of my very first reel as a kid, just your average school trip visiting an old abandoned tudor house. My favorite photo is a photo looking down the wood hole toilet on the floor with my friends at the bottom hysterically waving up in there puffa coats and head rucksacks, so that’s where I guess it all started. Equal to photographing things, I’m a story teller enthusiast and at one point I realised my life was way too weird not to shoot and tell. There isn’t a feeling worse than being somewhere and knowing it would make a brilliant photo and watching it in s l o w motion as it just passes you by, regretting it so bad you want to eat your own face off. This has happened too many times, therefore I always carry a camera around with me, and a spare face. My fetish camera? However weird that sounds, I guess I have about 5 ‘fetish cameras’, that I seem to go through in phases. It’s a bit like choosing a Flintstones’ Icepop, I never just go for the coca cola flavour, when there’s blueberry or cherry. I’m so fickle. I look in my drawer and feel sorry for them, just melting away. This month I think I love my Pentax Me Super the most. This photo is of my boyfriend Joel, in a standard English-coast Sea life Centre, called The Deep. The photo was inside an amazing walk-through tunnel under the aquarium, where loads of sharks swim above you, although there was about one and a half sharks in there. At this particular point, a shark finally swam above and Joel pointed it out and said, “Look, I just saw a shark’s vagina!” Brilliant. My main influences would probably be the process of Stephen Shore sleeping with Nan Goldin giving birth to Laura Lynn Petrick, although I find myself loving young photographers more and more as its all so raw, honest and fresh. At the moment I like to follow the works mostly of Jamie Shaw, Keith Davis Young and Jon Stanley Austin.
