There are few personalities among contemporary photographers as popular, influential and respected (and as often criticized) as Martin Parr. This is not only because of his numerous works, which have played and continue to play a major role in the development of both British and international documentary photography, influencing countless photographers around the world, but also because of his other activities.
Martin Parr is also an outstanding curator showing historical and contemporary photography and has a gift for discovering forgotten and underrated works and displaying them in the exhibitions he prepares. Among other things, he took charge of preparing the program for last year's Rencontres d'Arles festival (together with François Hébel) and managed to save the festival's reputation, which suffered severely in the 1990s. He is a great promoter of photo albums and together with Gerry Badger edited a two-volume project for Phaidon, The Photobook: A History. Parr is also an ardent collector of photographs and all objects related to photography, especially those that are not usually of interest to other collectors, such as kitschy photographs on badges, trays and plates, extremely banal postcards (some of which he has published), or even watches with a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Many of these eccentricities have been shown at various exhibitions, or in book form. In recent years Parr has taken to making documentaries, where, as with his photographs, he uses his peculiarly English sense of humor and subtle irony.
So far, he has shared his experiences primarily through organized creative workshops and guest lectures at various schools, but since 2004 he has devoted himself to pedagogy in a more systematic way as a professor of photography at the University of Wales in Newport. He has been a member of the legendary Magnum Agency for the past eleven years and has published numerous albums on documentary photography, a series of original advertising and fashion photographs, exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, the Queen Sophia Center in Madrid and the European House of Photography in Paris. Although he is an international star, his behavior is in no way stellar or whimsical.
Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey in 1952, and comes from a typical urban middle-class family, similar to those seen in many of his photos. He got into photography thanks to his grandfather, a keen amateur photographer, and in high school created his first series of documentary work for the school newspaper. In the early 1970s, he began studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic. There he met Daniel Meadows, Brian Griffin and other students who were interested in photographic documentary. By then, British photography already had a rich and more than century-old tradition in the genre, but at the time it seemed to be more of a burden. In contrast, a more subjective concept of documentary photography had long flourished in the United States, as well as in some Western European countries, represented by Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, or Mario Giacomelli. In Britain, traditional social documentary prevailed, continuing the thought pioneered by Billy Brandt or Bert Hardie. At the time, Martin Parr avidly sought out information about American photography, especially the kind presented by the wonderful non-commercial magazine Camera Work. Among British documentary photographers, he treasured the expressive style of Roger Mayne and Don McCullin, and above all the work of Tony Ray-Jones, who spent much time in America and attended classes taught by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Ray-Jones' symptomatic photographs, in which, upon his return to his homeland, he depicted English beaches and traditional local customs with a great sense of visual metaphor, inspired many young English photographers, including Martin Parr.
This influence is particularly evident in Parr's photographs taken at a mental hospital, in his project about the Butlin resort, where hundreds of working-class families vacationed in the same way, playing sports and eating meals, as well as in the many grotesque shots taken during a downpour, in thick fog, or during a snowstorm, which he showed in his album Bad Weather (Bad weather)(1982). Even in these photographs one can see the sense of humor, sensitivity to social differences and a certain mysteriousness that is one of the main values of most of Parr's works. Another important feature is his passion for the kitschy and tacky side of mass production, which first became clearly evident during an exhibition of his work Home, Sweet Home (Good everywhere, but best at home), which took place at Impressions Gallery in New York in 1974, during which Parr presented a moving installation consisting of photographs showing the tastelessly decorated interiors of English homes, set against a background of equally tasteless wallpaper, artificial flowers, porcelain figurines and souvenir plates decorated with pictures. Many years later he returned to this theme in his series Signs of Time, (1992), showing characteristic parts of English houses.
In the mid-1970s, Martin Parr and a group of friends moved to the small village of Hebden Bridge, where he and Sue Mitchell, who later became his wife, kept a record, both photographic and audio, of the rural life of an isolated group of elderly residents for four years. Never before or since had Parr taken photographs in which the sociological and anthropological aspect was so dominant, photographs so filled with lyricism, and never before had he gotten so close to the people he photographed.
A move to the vicinity of Liverpool in 1982 proved to be a turning point, both in his personal and professional life. Just a few miles from his new home is a shabby seaside resort, New Brighton. It was there that Parr found the subject for his next album, Last Resort (Last Resort), (1986), one of the best he has created to date. At the time, he was captivated by the documentary photographs of William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, so much so that he decided to work in color himself. He not only changed the type of film used, but also the format. He worked with a Plaubel Makina 6 x 7 cm camera on color negatives and, using flash, began to create extremely sharp and tonally rich photographs full of vivid, bright colors. The formal affinity of these, at times almost naturalistic, shots with the idealized aesthetics of commercial photography or with hyperrealistic painting provides a certain contrast to the motifs depicted - crowded, littered beaches where adults and children swim in dirty water, sunbathe near bulldozers, eat melting ice cream and line up in long lines for sausages with fries dripping with grease. These exceptionally powerful photographs show the tragicomic ordeals of many English people who lack the means to vacation in the Maldives or the Riviera, so they flee the crowded cities to places that offer the illusion of a vacation idyll. While Parr's gaze is not without irony and even sarcasm - for example, when he shows women sunbathing and gossiping without paying attention to the cries of their own children - it is never cynical, as some British critics have accused him of being. Despite the criticisms, showing Last Resort at a solo exhibition at the prestigious Serpentine Gallery in 1986 was undoubtedly Parr's first major success in London.
This series was so far the last in which Martin Parr showed the more proletarian side of British society. Since then, he has focused on the life of the middle class, which has improved dramatically under the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, and which is now the largest group of the British population. He is not alone in this, as this social class is also the focus of attention of other British documentary filmmakers, for example Chris Steele-Perkins, Paul Graham, Anne Fox and others who, like Parr, creatively exploit the possibilities of color photography. Martin Parr himself proudly admits to belonging to the upper middle class, and in Bristol, where he moved with his family in 1987, he practices such a lifestyle. Despite this, however, he continues to provoke and mock this class in his photographs, and despite living in comfort, he continues to look for bizarre situations in the daily life of this class that would help reveal the contradiction between reality and illusion. In Parr's photographs, we don't find drug addicts, dying of AIDS or lovers' intimate experiences, as in Nan Goldin's; we don't see the dramatic moments typical of war and times of conflict, as in James Nachtway's photos; nor do we see the desperation of the famine-stricken Sahel residents, as in Sebastiao Salgado's. Parr photographs ordinary people experiencing the same sorrows and joys as most of us. Yet he manages to show something that we either don't see or don't want to see in our lives.
In his series and album Cost of Living(1989) Parr captures, in photographs of rather loose composition, the unbearable tedium of formal social gatherings, garden parties or afternoon teas, through which new members of the middle class consolidate their social position and attempt to prove their achievements before their neighbors. In another set, One Day Trip, (1989), he ridicules those who undertake grueling ferry trips to France just to buy a few cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes a few pennies cheaper. A note of warning against Mammon, the consumerist lifestyle and the devaluation of traditional values echoes clearly in his photographs showing giant shopping malls, hypermarkets and supermarkets, where young children play an important role, often unattended by parents more interested in promotions and goods than their own children. The theme of shaky human relationships is also touched upon by Parr in a series of photographs of bored couples who have nothing to say to each other. Parr's special sense of humor and his capacity for self-criticism is evidenced by the fact that he included his self-portrait with his wife in this series.
Martin Parr also deals extensively with commercial and mass tourism, which is being practiced by more and more people around the world. In his album Small World (1995), shows a crowd of almost identical tourists in the fairy-tale Lous Castle in Bavaria, in a Japanese park, on crowded beaches or at the Tenerife airport, under the pyramids in Egypt and their counterparts in Las Vegas, on the Acropolis in Athens, at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on a safari in Africa, under a cable car in the Swiss Alps. His photographs are a remarkably eloquent testament to the ongoing globalization of tourism, where herd instinct prevails over individuality, where photographs taken in exotic places to dazzle friends are often more important than truly experiencing a place.
from the series: Small world, 1987-1994
In the mid-1990s, Parr responded to criticism of the stereotypical nature of his photographs, taken with a medium-format camera, by returning to the small picture, but this time using not a wide-angle lens, but a 60mm macro lens, enabling him to make large close-ups with minimal depth. In the series Common Sense (1999), shown simultaneously in many galleries around the world, from San Francisco to Prague to Tokyo, and a year later in his exhibition and album entitled Think of England, surprised everyone with works that were radically different from his previous photos. The use of Agfa Ultra flash further enhanced the brightness of the colors, making them look like shots from John Hinde's studio depicting Butlin Resort. Parr is even more sarcastic than ever in this case. In large close-ups, he shows pink sausages, pig-shaped pastries, leftover unhealthy food at fast food stands, parched skin and beer bellies of sunbathing tourists, dogs wearing sunglasses, kitschy souvenirs, ice cream sundaes with huge amounts of whipped cream, middle-aged ladies with fat rolls. He faced backlash not only from critics, who accused him of mocking poverty and bad taste, but also from Magnum Agency founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. During his visit to Prague in 1999, when he was preparing his exhibition here, he said to me: "Cartier-Bresson was against my admission to Magnum because he didn't like the irony in my photographs. That's why it took me more than six years to become a full member. But when he finally accepted my photographs, I completely changed my style. And that was already too much for him." The legendary French photographer wasn't the only one who didn't like Parr's work. The editor-in-chief of the now-defunct magazine Reportage and several-time Czech Press Photo jury member Colin Jacobson attacked Parr for his work with advertising agencies. However, neither these nor any other attacks discouraged Martin Parr from creating exceptional work in fashion photography or tackling new projects, such as his series on fans of Formula One racing in Japan in 2003, or the intermingling of American and Mexican culture, in which he returned to the style of his older photographs.
The article appeared in issue 19 of "Kwartalnik Fotografia" in 2005