Martin Parr's curious crop of images

Martin Parr is to exhibit celebrity photographs from his own collection at the newly opened Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool at the start of next year.

The collection, Painted Photographs, came together after Parr spent years combing flea markets and second-hand stores. It includes press prints and publicity shots of actors, musicians and sports stars from the post-war decades which have been marked up by newspaper picture desks and magazines and indicate areas for cropping, boosting colour or other kinds of editing. Painted Photographs includes images of Marilyn Monroe with her head circled, Yoko Ono with a cross on her nose, intended to be cut out of a photograph with John Lennon and James Dean marked to to be pulled from the background.

Marlene Dietrich and James Dean from Martin Parr's archive collection of press photographs

Parr's archive collection runs alongside Richard & Famous - also curated by the Magnum photographer - which will examine celebrity culture and showcase the work of Australian Richard Simpkin and Califonian photographer Simone Lueck. 'Star-hunter' Simpkins' whose work began as a personal project to photograph himself with celebrities, has resulted in a collection of over 1,000 images. "Knowing how difficult it is to get access to celebrities in this day and age," Parr says, "it is an awesome achievement, and turns his whole game into a compelling piece of art."

Richard Simpkins and Joan Collins (2010)

Lueck's work The Once and Future Queens, which also forms part of the show, is the result of an advert posted on Craigslist inviting older women to be photographed, dressed up as their favourite film stars. While Simpkins' work questions identity and social boundaries, LA-based Lueck's work homes in on ideas of gender, self image and mortality.

Simone Lueck, The Once and Future Queens

Read what we had to say about Open Eye Gallery's inaugural exhibitions in Power and Society