First published by The Times on 28 February 2019
“The timing has worked out perfectly,” says the photographer Martin Parr, whose exhibition Only Human opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London on March 7 with a section of new work entitled Brexit. Over the entrance and exit of that room, he adds merrily, there will be signs that say Remain and Leave. “Potentially on March 29, we’re all Leavers whether we like it or not.”
The new show explores British identity, as Parr has so successfully for more than four decades, capturing our idiosyncrasies in bright, unflinching colour. It includes famous images and new work snapped at his trademark stomping grounds of beach resorts, racecourses and dances; it gives us a glimpse into British communities abroad, and elite worlds such as Oxbridge and the City of London.
It’s unusual for Parr in also including some celebrity portraiture — from Pelé to Vivienne Westwood. “Because the National Portrait Gallery expects to show celebrity portraits, I thought we’d better have a room of them,” he says drily, and confirms that almost all of those pictures were commissioned, except for “Mike Leigh, who I’ve always liked”.
Parr is much more interested in the Brexit stuff. “I’m a classic Remoaner, of course,” he says. Since the referendum in June 2016 he has worked in Leave-voting areas including Lincolnshire and Cornwall, and says that he has found that quite therapeutic. Does he understand the Leavers? “Yeah, I guess, because they’re angry. You can see the austerity, the anger, the fact that this was a chance to really snub the government, and they jumped on it, without of course realising what the implications might be. Or perhaps they did.”
Parr is arguably our most successful documentary photographer; his breakthrough work — the seaside series The Last Resort, a study of Merseyside’s litter-strewn New Brighton — was first shown in the mid-1980s and he has been consistently prolific ever since, also spending a three-year stint as president of the prestigious agency Magnum Photos.
It’s perhaps surprising, then, that his last big London show, a retrospective at the Barbican, was in 2002. Then again, the British art world has not traditionally taken photography very seriously. When I previously interviewed Parr, in 2014, he complained bitterly that Tate Britain still hadn’t given a solo show to a living photographer.
Today he has less to complain about. This year, finally, Tate Britain has caught up: the photojournalist Don McCullin’s exhibition opened there this month. “You’ve got McCullin at the Tate, you’ve got [Diane] Arbus at the Hayward,” Parr says. “I mean, that’s pretty significant, really: three major shows of photography [including his] in London running at the same time. It’s slow, but you have to be thankful for progress.”
Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, Parr first remembers taking a picture of his father on a frozen stream in the cold winter of 1962-63. His parents weren’t artistic, “but my father was an obsessed birdwatcher, so I got my obsessional genes from him”. It was a few years later with his grandfather, an amateur photographer who gave him a Kodak Retinette, that he learnt to process film and make prints. “And by 13 or 14 I decided that’s what I wanted to be — a photographer.”
As an interviewee, Parr is good fun. He is working on a book called Death By Selfie and asks me to guess where in the world has the most selfie-related deaths — then laughs heartily when I say “Mount Everest?” (The correct answer is India.)
We meet at the Martin Parr Foundation, which opened in 2017 in Bristol, where he has lived with his wife since 1987. In the tight world of photography enthusiasts, Parr is Britain’s superstar; his satirical perspective has amassed a large and devoted following. I watch him sign someone’s book, and later he starts a chat with two clearly delighted visitors to the library.
At industry events such as the annual Paris Photo fair, I’ve seen him almost mobbed: the Justin Bieber of documentary photography, although significantly less vain (Parr once told me that he finds his clothes by “walking into a shop because it’s next to the bank”).
This fame is context-specific, he points out. “Most people in this country still don’t know who I am.” He enjoys that anonymity, but occasionally, particularly when shooting on beaches, it can become a problem; nowadays British people aren’t inclined to be relaxed about a man with a camera near their children. “If the police ever get called, which happens once every two or three years, then you get your press pass out.”
His team are constantly sending prints to people who are delighted to have spotted themselves in his pictures, but over the years critics have often complained that his portrayal of the British public is cruel. The through-line in much of his work is humans trying to make their lives more glamorous and exciting — old women in string bikinis and tanning oil; hen parties packed into hired limousines; racegoers in elaborate hats queueing for the Portaloos. The gap between aspiration and reality is often funny, but it can also be bleak.
“Everyone can think what they like,” he says. He recalls the backlash against The Last Resort in the 1980s. “People thought it was exploitation, you know — middle-class guy photographing a working-class community, that sort of stuff. The thing is, it was shown first in Liverpool and no one batted an eyelid, because everyone knows what New Brighton’s like. But when it was shown at the Serpentine in London, all hell [broke loose] — because middle-class people there don’t know what the north of England’s like. They haven’t seen the shabby conditions and degraded scenarios that people are sometimes living around.”
Are these reactions just other people’s class guilt, then? “I mean, you tell me. I haven’t spent a lot of time analysing it. I feel quite confident about what I’m doing, and I’m not producing propaganda or PR. I’m showing things how I find them, in a very honest, albeit subjective way. What else can I do?”
Parr has published more than 100 books — about 30 of them in the past five years. That’s a hell of a pace, and I suspect it ties in with his feverish fascination with, for want of a better word, stuff. He mentions the space dogs (Belka and Strelka, who went up in a Soviet satellite in 1960), because he has acquired and photographed a lot of Russian merchandise — weird celebratory stamps, postcards and clocks — for another forthcoming book.
“I’m also collecting Gaddafi watches to supplement my Saddam Hussein collection,” he says. “This stuff is so wacky, it’s irresistible.” He stores it at the foundation and another building in Bristol, as well as at home. “I’m the opposite of Marie Kondo [the decluttering guru].”
Parr is an assiduous collector of his own work too, which is one of the purposes of the foundation. “I’ve built an archive about Britain in the last 45 years, and I’ll never run out of things to photograph, because it’s such a huge subject. That archive is important. And it’s now decently housed and will be looked after after my death, because I’ve arranged it so that the foundation becomes sustainable.”
In recent years he has become a sort of godfather of photography, often championing the less well known; a leg-up from him can be a career-changer. To name one example, the Dublin-based photographer Eamonn Doyle self-published 750 copies of his first book in 2014 and planned to spend several years selling them. Then Parr posted about it on Flickr, describing it as “the best new street photo book I have seen in a decade”. “I think it was sold out within a couple of weeks after that,” Doyle told me.
This is another purpose of the foundation, which gives a platform to British and Irish photographers with exhibitions and talks. “I mean, if I like these people I want to share them, and because I have some influence now, you know, I can help facilitate that,” Parr says. “So I try and use it responsibly and intelligently.” When I suggest that it is in significant part thanks to him that photography is being taken more seriously in the UK than ever before, he looks embarrassed.
He’s overwhelmed with requests, though. “People want me to solve their problems, like ‘How do I get a book and a show and become famous?’ And it’s the ones that generally don’t ask that that are the most deserving, inevitably. Because if you’re thinking like that, then you probably haven’t got it.”