A girl with a curly mullet and a deep scowl staffs a seaside ice cream parlor, a mob of shirtless children behind her clamoring for snacks. One hand on hip, the other on the counter that keeps the hungry youths at bay, she looks straight at us as if to say, simultaneously, “Get me the hell out of here,” and “What are you looking at?”
Unruly children, garden parties, supermarkets, living rooms, crowded beaches, racetracks, nightclubs, full color, bright flash, up close: For many in Britain and abroad, images taken by the photographer Martin Parr, who died on Saturday at age 73, have come to define the nation, warts and all.
“There’s always been an element of controversy in my pictures,” he told The Architectural Review in 2020. “I never quite know why, because I’m just showing things as they are, or as I find them, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”
Some have seen his work — which captures its subjects with unflinching clarity — as sly or cynical, portraying a degraded world with little empathy for its subjects. In 1994, when the prestigious Magnum Photos cooperative was voting on whether to make Parr a full member, the Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffith canvassed other members not to admit Parr, and the agency’s founder Henri Cartier Bresson dismissed him as “an alien from another planet.” (Still, Parr slipped through by one vote and was later elected to serve as the agency’s president from 2013-2017.)
If you really look, as Parr so acutely did, the universe of his photographs is very much of this world — and every stripe of person in it. This is all the more true for its unvarnished focus on the everyday, whether conventionally attractive or not. It’s a testament to how spectacular, surreal, gross, beautiful, surprising and funny the ordinary can appear at any moment if the right lens is trained on it. And what else would a profound love for this bizarre and bewildering world look like?
“The ordinary things in life tend to get missed out,” Parr told the BBC in 1986 while working on a project to document and archive daily life in Salford, a city near Manchester in northwestern England. Commenting on the photojournalistic tendency to capture the extremes rather than the banalities of society, Parr noted that the textures of quotidian life, which he said were just as important and “vulnerable to change,” ended up not getting preserved.
Over a nearly six-decade career, Parr traveled not just his home country, but also the world, mounting a distinctive oeuvre defined by its use of color, pattern, composition (clean lines, frames within frames) and perspective (frontal, level with the subject).
Perhaps more than anything, however, you can always tell a Parr photograph for how it transforms an ordinary scene into a kind of vivid tableaux — as if his subjects are at once individuals and archetypes, taking part in narratives both singular and universal. Just think of the disgruntled girl at the seaside with her throng of demanding customers.
Do you see, too, when you look at her, Édouard Manet’s famous 1882 painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”? Or Jeff Wall’s striking 1979 “Picture for Women”?
Parr is less well-known for his early black-and-white pictures, most of which were taken on the west coast of Ireland and in Yorkshire in northern England. In these images, the extent to which his eye was preternaturally attuned to the beauty glimpsed in any moment is abundant: a stone cottage, windows lit from within, that seems to glow in the misty hills; a racehorse bounding across a beach in County Kerry as men watch from the black cobbled shore; two older women sleeping (or is it praying?) in narrow church pews; a bride embracing her mother, long white veil streaming in the wind.
Like the best photographers, Parr saw and captured the world as it was, which is to say boundless — ugly, bizarre, beautiful, weird, droll. “Photography doesn’t change the world. I don’t buy into that humanistic line of thought. I just go out with my camera to observe and present,” he told The Guardian newspaper in 2018. “You don’t do this job unless you care about people and have an interest in their well-being.”
In further testament to this belief, Parr was also known for his contributions to the wider world of photography — including his longstanding relationship with the annual Rencontres D’Arles festival in the south of France, which he curated in 2004 (an edition often seen as the event’s gold standard) and the establishment of his own foundation in Bristol, England, where he spent his later years.
The Martin Parr Foundation houses the photographer’s archive and his immense library, which is open access. It also holds exhibitions and publishes work by emerging and established artists who focus on Britain and Ireland. Who knows what future representations of these island nations will look like, but if they continue in the fond and frank tradition of Parr, they will be the opposite of alien.
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