Parr the revolutionary shows his softer side
Martin Parr: Only Human National Portrait Gallery ★★★★★
There’s a fully functioning café in the middle of this exhibition – the first to be permitted in a National Portrait Gallery show – with plastic seats in vivid red, chunky sugar cellars of the sort seen in “seaside caffs” and packets of Mini Cheddars displayed with a trophy-like prominence.
To anyone even slightly familiar with the British photographer Martin Parr’s work, the sense of “exotic familiarity” will be instantly recognisable. Parr’s high-detail, garishly coloured, hardflash photography takes us to an England of half-cut Channel ferry crossings and raucous hen nights in gimcrack holiday resorts: a Britain that “cultured people” don’t want to go to, don’t even want to think about – except when they see it in Parr’s photographs.
His photography appeared uncompromisingly raw and edgy when it became prominent in the Nineties (his work had been well known in the art world since the Seventies). Yet by the early Noughties, that outsider’s view of Britain had achieved official sanction, through a series of British Council-funded exhibitions around the world. The international success of Parr’s version of Britain (he’s apparently as popular in France these days as he is here) is a brilliant example of the double-bluffing British ability to make our weaknesses and eccentricities appear all part of our “greatness”.
The revelation of this exhibition, comprising 260 mostly recent photographs, is that the Parr vision has become not just the official view, but the official reality – no, the actual reality – of Britain today. That, certainly, is the impression given by a series of Parr-directed “idents”, microfilms shown between programmes, for BBC One – and what greater access to the nation’s consciousness could you ask for? From south London roller-skaters to a group of bog snorkellers in mid-wales they are all on the theme of “oneness”, and show Britain united in a spirit of quirky collectivity. Parr, the man who showed us to ourselves as a nation of Hogarthian grotesques, has become the guy who is getting us all to pull together in a time of trial.
The sense that we’re all living in a kind of Martin Parr theme park is even more apparent in “Everybody Dance Now”, where Parr’s once class-riven country has become a nation united in the pursuit of getting down, whether it’s goths in Whitby, turbaned Sikhs in Cardiff or dinner-jacketed public school kids at a summer ball. When Parr strays abroad, the feel is little different. A group of young Indian people taking selfies in the sea was snapped in Goa, but it could easily have been shot in, say, Worthing.
But while there’s barely an image in this exhibition that is less than excellent – and many are genuinely inspired – in recent years Parr’s photography has lost some of its bitter edge. Images of a Muslim festival filling a street in Bristol and an anxious-looking man pushing his wife, completely obscured by a huge fuchsia plant, through the Chelsea Flower Show in a wheelchair make terrific photographs, but it’s hard to see what they tell us about Brexit Britain except, perhaps, that whatever the country’s ethnic make-up we’ll keep muddling through in an essentially timeless Ealing Comedy spirit. Indeed, his “Britain at the Time of Brexit” series shows the country looking much the same as Parr’s Britain has at any other time. There are lots of Union flags, but in Parr World there always have been.
Parr talks in a video interview in the exhibition about his love-hate relationship with Britain, but you’ll struggle to find a shred of hate here. Even the final room’s essay on The Establishment feels essentially affectionate. The little boys in the blue coats and yellow socks of Christ’s Hospital public school may represent privilege, but they are for Parr, first and foremost, people and it’s that sense of generosity that makes this such an illuminating photograph.
And, while Parr sees himself as part of a photographic tradition “identified with movements for political and socioeconomic change”, there’s little sense of any burning revolutionary urge in the images. Parr the man may, you suspect, be a grumpy so-and-so, but Parr the photographer seems to be having far too much fun looking at Britain as it is now to want to change a thing.