Photographer Martin Parr turns 70. – Culture

Five years ago he asked Guardians Martin Parr to choose a favorite photo from his own oeuvre. Parr chose an image from August 2016: a long, meandering line on the beach at Penzance in Cornwall: people waiting for a boat to take them to the small island of St Michael’s Mount. “It was a hot day, if not bright sunshine,” Parr recalled. “The Brits are absolute masters at queuing. I thought it was good to capture the summer, the beach, the queue and the island in the background in one photo.”

But what the photographer actually summed up was and is what is often referred to as “Britishness”. In this case, the devoted patience of perseverance, the mood of a windy vacation on the English coast, the self-assurance in seeking symbolic ones landmarks – in this case a castle on a tiny island. With ambivalence, ruthlessly, but never denouncing, he has it clichés of his home country and in the process created a candy-colored documentary panorama of British everyday scenes, eccentricities and excesses over the decades.

Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, England, in 1952. His grandfather George, a keen amateur photographer himself, encouraged Martin’s interest in photography at an early age. Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970 to 1973. After graduating he worked for the Manchester Council for Community Relations for three months but soon had his first New York exhibition, Home Sweet Home.

Martin Parr.

(Photo: Collection Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Agency Focus)

Parr studied, initially in black and white and modeled on models such as Peter Mitchell and William Eggleston, the rural population of Yorkshire, around Manchester and in Ireland. In 1982 he then took a radical step: For the project “The Last Resort”, with which he documented the holiday habits of the English working class in the run-down seaside resort of New Brighton, he switched to color. From then on, highly saturated, heavily lit medium format images were Parr’s look.

Some critics, who dismissed Parr’s images of people in mini plis and neon T-shirts on boardwalks and bumper cars as arrogant exposure, failed to understand that Parr was not judging. It wasn’t about denigrating English seaside resorts or the working class, but about looking down on milieus and their often unreflected self-perception.

For him, Brexit was a particularly rich, if not particularly pleasant source of inspiration, because here the will to continue an alleged national continuity met the reality of a changing world. It is precisely these often unsettling changes that Parr has observed and recorded over the decades.

“What I felt from the start in these photos was an ambivalence about the themes I shared,” artist Grayson Perry once said of Parr’s work. “When I look at images of gentry ladies gorging themselves on cake buffets, tourists caught in clichés, drunken revelers, and the merrily fierce British working class, they all seem uncomfortably hovering between comedy and tragedy .”

Photographic chronicler of Britishness: English Breakfast on Dorset Beach, 1996.

English breakfast on Dorset beach, 1996.

(Photo: Martin Parr/ Magnum Photos/Agency Focus)

In fact, it’s captured in almost nuclear-bright colors Full English breakfast with fried eggs, beans and bacon are just as much a part of the British Parr mosaic as are bored old ladies under the drying hood at the hairdresser and the patriotic “British and proud” neck tattoo. But it also includes upper-class people tucking into a tray of cheese bites at the Chelsea Flower Show, or a photo sequence in which a number of visitors all smell the same rose. Being trapped in class-specific codes, the clash of self-mythicization and sobering reality, no one has captured all of this as consistently and with such a keen eye for absurd details as Martin Parr.

His latest exhibition, the first since he was diagnosed with cancer last year, is being held at the OOF Gallery, which forms part of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium. It presents a compilation of images taken in and around football stadiums from the 1970s onwards. Football plays an important role in British society, says Parr. He helps people, especially men, to find access to their emotions. And he is “very tribalistic and important for creating one’s own identity”.

Questioning this self-constructed identity has been Martin Parr’s mission to himself for more than half a century. But the often uncompromising look behind the British identity facade has always been paired with a deep understanding of the need for this facade. A mixture that not only makes his work deeply British, but above all deeply human. Martin Parr, who was awarded the title “Commander of the British Empire” last year, turns 70 this Monday.

source site