Was Martin Parr Just Taking the Piss?

Martin Parr’s death last December made front-page news in France. This is the country that cradled him “like a rock or movie star”, in the words of Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, which is staging a major retrospective of the British photographer’s work [30 January to 24 May]. The title, Global Warning, nods towards the serious messages that often lie behind Parr’s playfully kitschy images, focusing on his photographs of the excesses of mass tourism and unbridled consumerism. It’s also a counterpoint to the “Oh so British” identity that was conferred upon him across the channel — a reminder that we are all complicit in the contradictions of Parr’s photographs, including himself. "I'm a tourist. I'm a consumer,” he once said. “I do the things that I photograph and can be criticised for."

The response was only slightly less muted back home, with tributes pouring in from such unlikely bedfellows as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rishi Sunak, Karen Elson and The Pet Shop Boys. Despite persistent accusations from some quarters that his photographs are cruel or mocking, the British public came to embrace Parr’s observational satire of his fellow countrymen, seeing common ancestry with a long tradition of self-depreciating humour as commentary.

Martin Parr, New Brighton, England, 1983–85. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

And yet his breakthrough work, The Last Resort, an unromanticised portrait of a Northern seaside town shot during the height of Thatcherism, did represent a real rupture to the dominant humanist tradition of documentary photography. Parr’s images were colour, for a start, the medium of commercial photography, and there was no sense of paternalism or nostalgia about their subjects. “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” wrote David Lee in Arts Review [Note: it seems to have been called Arts Review then, not Art Review] when it was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 1986.

It had been exhibited a year earlier to much less controversy at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, just across the River Mersey from New Brighton where the pictures were made, shown alongside Tom Wood’s photographs of the same suburb of Wallasey, the town where both men lived. “It was seen by some as taking the piss out of the working classes, which to a certain extent it was,” says Neil Burgess, Open Eye’s then director. “But I don't think the working classes gave a fuck, really. They came into the show and thought it was hysterical. We didn't have any complaints from people who saw themselves in those pictures at all.”

Martin Parr, Salford, England, 1986. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Parr self-published The Last Resort the following year to coincide with the Serpentine exhibition and its showing at the Rencontres d’Arles photofestival in southern France. This marked the beginning of his French love affair, and opened him up to an international audience for the first time. Over the next 15 years, he produced much of his best work, presented as a series of photobooks accompanied by exhibitions that pushed further away from photographic convention while sharpening the satire.

He turned his eye towards Britain’s affluent classes (The Cost of Living, 1989), to questions of taste and conspicuous consumerism (Signs of the Times, 1992), and towards mass tourism and the globalisation of leisure culture (Small World, 1995). It culminated in what he regarded as his best photobook, Common Sense (1999), presenting his experiments with a ring flash and a macro lens to isolate close details, directing our attention towards consumer excess — albeit with his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Martin Parr, New Brighton, England, 1983–85. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

At any one time, there is a Parr exhibition happening somewhere in the world. And in April 1999, there were 41 across five continents — all simultaneously showing Common Sense. Institutional backing followed, with the Barbican staging a full-scale retrospective in 2002 that travelled to another eight venues across Europe, including the Reina Sofia. The exhibition, curated by Val Williams, drew attention to Parr’s love of collecting and the vernacular, a theme that Parrworld at Munich’s Haus der Kunst ran with in 2008, featuring the photographer’s fast growing collection of objects, postcards, photobooks and prints made by others. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery did a show focused around his pictures of people, Only Human. And in 2021 he was awarded a CBE.

Despite his public profile and his success as an artist, Parr’s work remained surprisingly affordable. “Selling his work has always been quite tough,” says Jonathan Stephenson, the founder of Rocket Gallery in East London. “He never made it easy for his galleries,” of which there were 11 representing him at the time of his death, “partly because he was so prolific. It wasn't a Gursky situation where he maybe did eight photographs in a year, and there were three of each. With Martin, it was endless!”

Martin Parr, Blue Grotto, Capri, Italy, 2014. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Despite his reputation for being a shrewd businessman (which was another way of saying that Parr was a canny collector of other people’s work), he was fairly nonchalant about print sales. “He never played the art game,” says Stephenson. “I kept trying to move him in more of an art world direction, trying some of the normal practices, showing the scarcity of work, and so on. But after about 10 years, I just gave up. I thought, ‘This is how Martin operates. We can't fight it, and we shouldn't fight it. We should just run with it.’ So, one of the aspects of that is the pricing of the work. When we started [together] in 1997 with the West Bay exhibition, those photographs were £750. And now the equivalent is like £6500, which is still relatively low.”

Parr delighted in describing himself as a “promiscuous” photographer. He identified primarily as a conceptual documentarist, undertaking his own long-term projects, but he also shot a lot of commercial assignments, especially fashion. He was a favourite of Alessandro Michele, the Italian fashion designer who revived Gucci, and he was on an aprés-ski-themed mountain shoot for Vogue Italia just two days before he died on 06 December. Other times he called himself a community photographer, taking on commissions from local arts organisations such as MultiStory in the West Midlands.

He found his community — as well as much of his income — through Magnum Photos, the legendary agency he joined as a full member in 1994, scraping in by one vote. “Martin took to Magnum like a duck to water,” says Burgess, who left Open Eye in 1986 to open the agency’s London office. “He was funny, engaging, and delivered results. He was one of the few photographers who worked comfortably across editorial, commercial, and the art market. He spoke all three languages fluently.”

Martin Parr, New Brighton, England, 1983–85. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Parr didn’t depend on the art market for money, nor did he want to conform to a singular identity. For him, that spelt creative death. The art market was just another audience. It was also another world to interrogate through his lens. He regarded it with playful distance. “He did crazy things,” says Janet Borden of the eponymous New York gallery. “Like when he did laser prints for Common Sense, and they cost 25 bucks each. It was like selling socks! It was horrible!” she laughs. “It's just hard to sell a $25 item as a $2000 item.”

Much of the money that Parr made was spent on collecting. He amassed 12,000 photobooks, one of the greatest collections of its kind. He co-authored three books on the history of the photobook, determined that a major aspect of the medium’s development had been overlooked, as had the contribution of many countries, such as Japan, and individual photographers. The collection was acquired by Tate in 2017, with the support of the LUMA Foundation. The roughly £3m from the acquisition helped him set up the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, which supports and promotes photography made in the UK and Ireland. Although he is one of the most pivotal photographers of his era, his collecting is an equally important legacy. 

“Many foundations are set up posthumously, whereas Martin and the team have spent eight years getting [MPF] to the place it is now,” says Jenni Smith, the Foundation’s director. “It is now our job to ensure that it continues in the same way, that Martin’s vision, his legacy and his support for other photographers continues beyond his lifetime. In a strange way, his own work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others. We hope to spend time exploring his archive and to exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future.”

Martin Parr, New Brighton, England, 1983–85. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

To that end, the Foundation will reopen on 20 February with an exhibition of The Last Resort, 40 years after it was first published and shown at the Serpentine. It will show the original sequence in the book alongside archival material to give new context to the three-year project, including criticism and correspondence around the work’s making and reception. A facsimile edition of the original book will be published by Dewi Lewis in the autumn. It’s a fitting tribute to Parr the photographer, who knew that his first major body of colour photography would forever be his most remembered.

In a public Zoom interview during Covid, he reflected: “If I'm knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.” 

The Last Resort at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, 20 February – 24 May; Global Warning at Jeu de Paume, Paris, through 24 May