In the world of photography, if you want to start an argument, just mention the 55-year-old English photo-documentarist Martin Parr. Parr’s passion for recording everyday frailties and humdrum tawdriness – a larkily colourful social panorama, taking in the unappealing scrum of mass consumerism, the curious rituals of the middle class and the messy indulgences of the super-rich – elicits a very traditional English reaction: it is not everybody’s cup of tea. Parr is a tremendous polariser. He’s either a pin-sharp satirical genius who tells uncomfortable truths with comedic flair – a view enthusiastically endorsed by subscribers to the trendy online photography site Flickr, which carries a message board dedicated to him entitled Martin Parr We Love You. Or he’s that heartlessly cynical smartarse whose pictures were once condemned by the late great Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism, as coming “from another planet”.
The argument has gone global. Parr’s fame abroad has reached an all-time high. He now does 80% of his commissioned work in foreign parts such as Dubai, South Africa, Australia and South America. In May, the largest exhibition to date of his work, Parrworld, will open at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Germany, in particular, loves Martin Parr. But international acclaim has not quietened his critics at home. Despite the public popularity of his retrospective show at London’s Barbican in 2002, the reviews were brief and lukewarm. No big British gallery has so far agreed to take Parrworld, the Hayward on the South Bank being one of the first to decline. And the sniping carries on. Before meeting Parr, I spoke to a longtime associate and fellow photographer, who unhesitatingly called him “totally fearless… the greatest observer of people this country has ever produced”. I also heard from a newspaper picture editor who dismissed him as “a gratuitously cruel social critic who sneers at foibles and pretensions”. The most widely voiced objection to Parr’s work complains that it adopts a stance of condescension towards its subject matter. It was this view that obstructed his election to membership of the elite photographic co-operative Magnum. Described by its co-founder, Cartier-Bresson, as “a community of thought” reflecting “a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually”, Magnum argued for six years over the admission of Parr to its ranks. The late Philip Jones Griffiths, whose 1971 book, Vietnam Inc, was influential in the anti-war movement, led the charge against Parr, who has always avoided big news stories. In 1994 he finally scraped in, reputedly achieving the necessary two-thirds majority by the narrowest margin ever: one vote.
In person, he hardly cuts a controversial figure. Like any successful spy, Martin Parr is the sort of guy you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed him in the street. As soon as he welcomes you into the tall, slightly scruffy Georgian terrace house in Clifton, Bristol, where he and his wife, Susie, and daughter, Ellen, have lived for 20 years, you understand why he has for so long been able to get away with pointing his camera at strangers, capturing them in a variety of unflattering activities and postures. In all probability, they barely noticed he was there. Everything about him – from the owlish specs to the self-effacing grin and the bottle-green slacks and sweater – seems designed to deflect attention. His manner – friendly without being effusive – is similarly unremarkable. He happily shows you around the house, pointing out cabinets filled with the weird iconic tat he has accumulated over the years, such as watches bearing images of Saddam Hussein, or plates commemorating the 1984 miners’ strike. In the basement are boxes of American toilet paper printed with the face of Osama Bin Laden. Parr is especially tickled by a couple of gaudy Afghan rugs depicting the twin towers before they came down. He calls these curious ephemera “shadows of human foible”.
He has much less to say about his personal life. Any questions about difficult times are answered with reference to technical problems he has encountered in his work. The closest he gets to opening up is the disclosure that tonight’s the night for his weekly poker game with some local pals. He mentions that Susie, a speech therapist who works with teachers treating stroke victims, is doing something upstairs, but he doesn’t introduce her. The arrogance some have discerned in his photography is hard to detect when he talks about it. He likes to speak in general terms about how “the British don’t take documentary photography seriously”. He thinks it’s a shame that “our best-known photographers are commercial, like David Bailey”. But he prefers not to theorise much about his own pictures, and offers a studiously mundane manifesto: “Ordinary people and ordinary things, like the local supermarket, inspire me with the same passion that leads other photographers to go to war zones, or famines, or take pictures of Aids victims.” He denies he is any less humanistic than fellow Magnum members such as Jones Griffiths, with whom he says he had “raging arguments”. Jones Griffiths, according to Parr, “wore his concern on his sleeve, whereas I disguise my humanism by making it look like entertainment”.
Campaigning, of any kind, is not Parr’s thing. “We are surrounded by pictures of propaganda of one sort or another, which even quite intelligent people don’t seem to realise. Even a family snapshot album is carefully edited so that any dysfunctionality is not shown, not allowed. I am only ever interested in showing the world as it is.” Or the world as he sees it, anyway. He says he thinks of himself as “a quintessentially British photographer, fascinated by comedy and irony”, implying there are hundreds of others out there like him, which there plainly aren’t. “I just choose what I think are the right things to look at in light of what’s happening in the world today, whether it’s the food we eat, the shops we go to, or the tourist locations we visit.”
As he says this, he fixes you a steady, piercing stare that strikingly belies his nondescript man-in-the-garden-centre appearance. It is this stare, when directed through the lens of his camera, that impresses collaborators such as Graham Fellows, the comedian better known as John Shuttleworth, who recently worked with Parr on some short films about the Shetlands. “I often wondered, ‘Why’s Martin pointing the camera there?’ And suddenly a little old lady pops into the frame. He really is remarkable in the stuff he latches onto.” According to the photographer Brian Griffin, a friend of Parr’s since their days together as students at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s, “Martin isn’t what I would call technically adept. But what he has is an incredibly perceptive eye. When you walk down the street with Martin, he notices everything.”
Parr inherited his love of photography from his grandfather, a keen amateur who would take him as a boy into his darkroom, where black-and-white images would slowly swim into view, as if by magic, in the developing tray. “He introduced the bug, and it has never left me,” Parr says. When he was 13, his grandad gave him a book, Instructions to Young Photographers, with the inscription “To Martin, hoping he will cultivate a seeing eye for all beauty of line, form and colour”. Before he got his first camera he had already developed his own interest in scrutinising things. He was an energetic trainspotter and collector who turned the cellar of the family’s suburban home in Chessington, Surrey, into a makeshift museum where he stored fossils, rock and coins. “Stamps,” Parr says briskly, “were too easy.” The unexciting nature of an adolescence spent between Surbiton grammar school, the local Methodist youth club and, in particular, weekend bird-watching expeditions with his parents to Hersham sewage farm, seems to have provided him with a training in bemused detachment that has since become his trademark. “When I went on those bird-watching trips,” he says, “I would of course be watching the bird-watchers.”
When Brian Griffin met Parr on the photography course at Manchester Poly in 1970, he sensed a kindred spirit: ambitious to succeed and with a similar sense of humour. Griffin recalls much dope-smoking and several high-spirited trips up onto the surrounding moors. “Every Boxing Day, Martin and I would take about 30 magic mushrooms, drive up there and charge about like kids.” Griffin also remembers the photographic exhibitions and competitions they would stage for fun in each other’s flats.
They were following what was, for aspiring documentary photographers at the time, the prescribed route. Parr says he was trying “to show the traditional aspects of working-class life in a lyrical way”, in the style of the photorealists of the 1930s whose pictures of life in the north of England during the Depression era, the Mass Observation project, he calls “truly inspirational, and the reason why I went north”. Like them, he shot only in black and white – the approved format back then for any serious photographer. As a student he photographed the inhabitants of a back-to-back terrace in Manchester, and spent a summer observing holidaymakers at play at Butlins in Filey. After graduating he moved to Hebden Bridge, a declining Yorkshire mill town, where he filmed the tiny, ageing congregations of Methodist chapels. While there he started going out with another of the town’s middle-class immigrants, Susie Mitchell, an English graduate who was studying to become a speech therapist. When her work took her to Ireland in 1980, he followed, setting up his darkroom in their Dublin house and continuing to render scenes of Irish country life in tasteful black and white. By now his reputation, based on several limited-edition books of his photographs, was solid; but compared with peers like Brian Griffin, whose work was at that point appearing on the covers of albums by rock bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen and Depeche Mode, Parr was still an unknown.
Parr’s watershed year was 1982. Susie got a job in Liverpool, and the couple moved to Wallasey on Liverpool Bay, not far from the seaside resort of New Brighton. It was here that he turned his back for ever on the lyrical, monochrome approach. Using bright, saturated colour, he homed in on the screaming kids, listless parents, bad food and piles of rubbish that scarred New Brighton’s polluted, beachless waterfront. The northern working class – the sacred cow of British photojournalism up to this point – had never been less sympathetically portrayed. When these pictures were published, and also shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1986 in an exhibition titled The Last Resort, Parr was widely assumed to be a pitiless Thatcherite, offering up his victims, in the words of one reviewer, as “a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience”.
Twenty-two years later, Parr remains unapologetic. Politically he says he has always been “classic soft left” and was a passive supporter of the miners’ strike, which “I sort of regret not photographing, but you can’t do everything, right?”. He attributes his change of direction to aesthetic imperatives. “I thought my previous photographs looked dowdy, and that if I was trying to document over-the-top holiday scenes, I needed to use colour. And when I made the move, it changed my tune. I suppose I started to make a critique of society as it is, rather than a celebration of what it used to be. I was showing how our once-great society is falling apart.”
After The Last Resort, he turned his attention to the beneficiaries of Thatcherism: the middle class. In 1987 he moved to Bristol, “because we couldn’t afford London and it’s a perfect middle-class city”. The first fruit of the move was The Cost of Living in 1989, a collection that observed a comfortable stratum of society in its preferred habitats: school speech days, craft fairs, Laura Ashley shops. He said at the time that he was “very much examining my own position as a middle-class person who had flourished in a political climate that I felt somewhat opposed to”. As his popularity grew, particularly abroad, he widened his approach and started to travel further afield. In One Day Trip in 1988, another collection that enraged the politically correct photojournalism establishment, he filmed glassy-eyed booze cruisers loading mountainous quantities of cheap wine and lager into supermarket trolleys in Calais. These people look even more hopeless than the crowd at New Brighton, but Parr says what interested him about them was “their vulnerability, which is what I always look for in my work, because it’s the antidote to propaganda. Vulnerability and propaganda don’t go together”.
