At 71, I am prepared for a generation of heroes, generally a decade or so older, to start dying out. Farewell, Sir Tom! Hold on, Joni! Not yet, Bob! But the swish of the Reaper's scythe can seem to be getting increasingly and uncomfortably close at times. Martin Parr has just died, at the ridiculously early age of 73. If you've already watched the film released earlier this year, I Am Martin Parr (it's on both Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer), you'll have realised he was unwell: not many street photographers use a walking frame. Even fewer manage to look so grimly cheerful about it. Probably just him, in fact.
If you don't know who Martin Parr is then I really don't know why you are reading this blog. There will be plenty of obituaries, so I won't go over the obvious biographical ground. Let's stick to what Martin has done for me!
On London's Charing Cross Road, once known for its many bookshops, there used to be a famous art and photography bookshop known as Zwemmer's. In the days before the internet, the best way – really, the only way – to discover new publications and new artists was to visit such a specialist shop, and browse the stock. In the 1980s and 90s, whenever I was "in town", as we say, I would make a point of visiting Zwemmer's, hoping to find something special to add to my growing photobook collection.
Art bookshop browsers are a grubby, inky-fingered bunch, so Zwemmer's used to wrap the books on display in clear film, which meant that you at least stood a chance of buying an unblemished copy. Now that books generally arrive in the post in a pristine, shrink-wrapped state, it's easy to forget how "shop-worn" a substantial volume might get on the shelves before anyone actually bought it. As it happened, Zwemmer's also published a few books itself, and one of these was Bad Weather, which contained a series of wryly-observed black and white photographs of people in "bad weather" scenarios, some of them hilarious, by an up and coming photographer named Martin Parr, who had used an underwater camera to make them. There was a stack of them, unwrapped and in mint condition, so I bought one.
I became something of a fan, and bought everything of his that was published. I might even blame Martin for igniting my passion for collecting photobooks. although, unlike Martin himself, I am a collector and completist who knows when to stop. I mean, honestly, Saddam Hussein watches... Why, Martin, why? So, although I bought all his books of breakthrough colour work like The Last Resort when they appeared, I stopped after Small World, as it seemed he was repeating himself. Besides, flash photography of plates of baked beans and garish cakes were really not my thing; I preferred the hunt for abandoned Morris Minors in Irish fields (A Fair Day). I think the only subsequent volumes of his I ever bought were the magisterial three-volume The Photobook: a History, compiled with Gerry Badger.
In those days I was still only in the early stages of becoming a photographer myself. I had recently bought my first SLR – an Olympus OM-1n – and was feeling my way past the glossy honeytraps and gearhead porn of Amateur Photographer to the more austere monochrome art uplands of Creative Camera. As I have mentioned before, while starting our working lives in Bristol we happened to occupy the flat above some guy called Paul Graham, and I was still sufficiently photographically illiterate that the only reason I bought a copy of his first self-published book, A1: the Great North Road, when it appeared in a nearby bookshop on Whiteladies Road, was because it amused me that the address of the publisher, Grey Editions, was also mine.
But by the 1990s I felt I was finally getting somewhere as a photographer, but was in need of some direction and validation; I began signing up for workshops at Peter Goldfield's Duckspool establishment in Somerset, one of the best decisions I have ever made. So in September 1992 I attended a four-day residential workshop with Martin Parr.
Although I already knew that his style of "street" documentary would never be mine I was still an admirer of his work; my most recent Parr purchase had been One Day Trip, his photographs of "booze cruise" Channel ferry crossings, commissioned by the Mission photographique transmanche of the Centre régional de la photographie Nord-Pas-de-Calais. However, unlike the workshop I'd done with Thomas Joshua Cooper the previous year, this one was going to be an interesting but not transformative experience.
I think it's fair to say that Martin was not a great teacher. Great teachers who are also first rank practitioners are very rare. True, he was a very incisive speaker about his own work, and the work of others working in a similar documentary vein, but had little to say about other approaches to photography, or even about simply poor, derivative work, which is after all what mainly turns up at workshops. Where Cooper (also not a great teacher, but a very charismatic individual), confronted by shabby or complacent photo-club work, would reach for the verbal stiletto, drive it between the culprit's ribs and give it a twist, Parr was simply lost for words. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... I think he was basically too kind, too English perhaps, to criticise work that he didn't like or understand.
Coincidentally, Duane Michals was receiving an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society during the workshop, so Martin arranged for us all to travel over to Bath to hear him speak, which surprised and pissed off a number of participants – "not what we've paid for!" – but I suspect that I, at least, derived more memorable "takeaways" from that very entertaining hour than from the entire Parr workshop. I also had my one and only ride ever on the luxurious leather seats of an upscale Jaguar (is there any other kind?) belonging to another participant.
As it turned out, I had to leave a day early, having received an urgent SOS message from my workplace – by then I was the Systems Librarian at Southampton University – so I missed out on the intensive group "critique" of my own portfolio. Which was probably just as well. I don't think Martin would have found much to connect with in what I had brought along. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... Although I do treasure the memory of Peter Goldfield's comment – he had taken a preliminary peek at our portfolios – that the person who would really like my work was Fay Godwin, and that I should keep an eye out for the new direction her photography had taken. A few years later I spotted the gorgeous little Stella Press hardback issue of Glassworks & Secret Lives in the window of another Charing Cross Road bookshop, just published, and pounced on one of the signed copies inside.
It should go without saying that Martin Parr was a very admirable man, whose photographic style and chosen subject matter have exerted an enormous influence on documentary photography, and who also dedicated his considerable energies to the generous advocacy of the work of others and of photography in general, not least through the Martin Parr Foundation that he established in Bristol. But he is also much misunderstood, as people often mistake his wry critique – highlighting those visual incongruities that can illuminate society's contradictions as well as people's pretensions and well-meaning idiocies – for a kind of cruelty. But where someone like Bruce Gilden is in-yer-face cruel, Martin Parr was more like a fearless, clear-sighted stand-up comedian. [1]
If he had a superpower, I think it was a variation of that essential delusion of the "street" photographer: that is, he believed he was invisible, and yet able to emerge at will into a disarming display of avuncular affability, once he'd spotted a likely subject. He wasn't invisible – far from it – but that belief in his ability to pop in and out of awareness is surely what enabled him to point a flash gun at drunken booze-cruisers, and causes him to look so cheerful, plodding along the seafront with his walking frame in I Am Martin Parr. Heh, they can't see me! They don't know what I'm up to. Yet...
For what it's worth, I think it will be established that his very best work was done quite early on and that he never quite developed a "late style" that is the equal of his truly ground-breaking work in The Last Resort, say, or Small World. His very early monochrome work is gathering admirers, too, since the publication of Early Works in 2019 (I see copies are already going for silly prices). In the end, as a photographer he seemed to have become the prisoner of his own signature stylistic moves. But, what moves! Few photographers have created and inhabited such a distinctive style, palette, and subject matter, used to such consistent effect. It may not appeal to you, but you know it when you see it. As my partner (not a photographer) so often exclaims when we are out and about, "Oh, look! There's a real Martin Parr!" And, for a photographer, what better tribute is there than that?
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