“I just show things as I see them,” said the photographer Martin Parr, who died of cancer aged 73 on 6 December. His topic was predominantly the British public and what he saw was a chip-eating, flag-waving, sunburnt, nostalgia-ridden, red-trouser wearing, class-divided and ritual-addicted people. His work depicts either an unlovely nation – easy to sneer at, difficult to love – or an unapologetically quirky and eccentric national mindset. Sometimes both. This is England. This is Britain.
When, in 1986, he published The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, showing Merseyside holidaymakers catching some sun on the resort’s concrete promenades or eating fish and chips in rubbish-strewn bus shelters, Parr was accused of making fun of the working class but, although he had a middle class background, these were his people; he was a local who lived in Wallasey. He was not the first photographer to be accused of exploitation, Diane Arbus faced the claim for much of her career, but, said Parr, this was not exploitation, the photographs were meant to show something not just of the reality of these lives but the reality of the north itself to southerners who had no idea about what it was like there. He pointed out, for good measure, that the rubbish wasn’t a photographer’s prop – he didn’t put it there.
In his 1989 collection The Cost of Living he turned his camera on those oblivious southerners, and photographed the well-to-do in their finery at the horses, at garden parties, in their tasteful sitting rooms and at public school open days. Meanwhile, Think of England (1995-1999) is filled with images of bowls clubs, polo and Henley-on-Thames. Fewer accusations came his way for these images.
What these two poles allowed is for each socio-economic group – and viewers from any other category – to adopt Parr as their own, the chronicler of an inherently ridiculous people: that is, not them. A fellow photographer, with the New Brighton pictures in mind, once accused him of being “Margaret Thatcher’s favourite photographer” but, as Parr told the Observer, “all photojournalists are left wing because you can’t do this job unless you care about people”, and that included him.
Parr’s first forays into people watching came as a bird watcher. His father was an avid twitcher, the present of the Surrey Bird Club, and Parr junior would accompany him on field trips. He was more interested, however, in the human obsessives than in the birds themselves and used a camera in his spotting rather than a pair of binoculars.
His early career was as a more traditional documentary photographer working in approved black and white. His subjects were essentially the same as in later life – he photographed a buffet after a non-conformist chapel meeting, worshippers eagerly piling up their plates; commuters caught in the rain, one with a cardboard box rather than un umbrella; rodent fanciers at the Sowerby Bridge Mouse Show, held in the St John’s Ambulance rooms (the small details carry weight in his pictures); or The Ancient Order of Henpecked Husbands Annual General Meeting, at Nazebottom, Hebden Bridge.
When Parr turned to colour photography, often using a flash in full daylight to impart an extra shine bordering on the lurid, he upset some in the photographic community who saw colour as belonging to the realm of advertising rather than serious reportage. Although he was also hailed for making the switch there was nothing new about it: the American photographer William Eggleston had done so in the 1960s – see his Untitled (Supermarket boy with carts), Memphis.
In interviews Parr stated that “There’s something very interesting about boring.” He also saw it as an opportunity. Most photographers, he said, chased the beautiful, the historic and the important, so he preferred to look the other way and poke his camera where theirs didn’t go. The boring, he found, could often be gently humorous – a spaniel in sunglasses, a pair of stars and stripes budgie-smugglers on a drooping male bottom, disembodied legs ending in open-toed sandals over pink socks.
Much as he loved “the craziness of the English, with all their hobbies and race meetings, and the summer fêtes”, Parr did not confine himself to photographing the hotch-potch citizens of the British Isles. Mexico and Paris, the Amalfi coast and the Grand Canyon were gathering places for displays of human oddity too. Or not oddity perhaps, although singled out in his individual frames they appear that way, but rather herd behaviour and the communal need to gather and interact. In one telling picture he showed individual tourists in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, three are having their photographs taken by their companions and all – as if mimicking a tai chi move – adopt the pose of holding the tower up, a gag that is never funny but never fails. There’s no seeming judgement apparent, as in all his work, he was part anthropologist – this is just what people do.
Nevertheless, in 2010, Parr said: “I make serious photographs disguised as entertainment” in order to “make the pictures acceptable to find the audience”. But in some lights that entertainment is not particularly noble, it simply means laughing at others. And “other” matters in his pictures; after all, there can’t be many people who would really want to be the subject of one of his photographs. Perhaps, though, Parr genuinely was an embodiment of the old saw that “the camera is an eye”, albeit a distinctive one, because if he was a satirist the conclusion must be that either we like being a bit of a joke, or we don’t get it.
[Further reading: My hero Tom Stoppard]
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