What are these people so excited about? The group of beachgoers on Porthcurno beach in Cornwall look out to sea, grey-blue and stormy; in their colorful holiday shirts they seem to be in a kind of silent shock, a red flag is next to them. But then there is that one little boy who breaks through the rigidityhe looks straight at the camera as if wondering: Can’t we just keep playing?
Much of the enormous oeuvre of documentary photographer Martin Parr, who died yesterday of cancer, comes together in this one photo from 2017: an everyday setting, cheerfully colored as in a holiday snapshot. At first you have to laugh a bit about it, but at the same time you feel that something bigger is being told, especially when you see the year, the year after the Brexit referendum. You could even interpret the everyday beach scene as a kind of commentary on this: the group stares frozen at the terrifying unknown beyond the sea, while only the boy does not let himself be carried away.
Funny and serious at the same time, that is Parr’s work: “I make serious photos disguised as entertainment,” as he once described it. You could see it in all his famous photos since his breakthrough in the 1980s. They are usually about very ordinary people with very ordinary leisure activities, especially from the… working class of England: series about bored couples in restaurants, people eating at tourist locations, conservative clubs.
Martin Parr’s work at an exhibition in Valencia.
Photo Juan Carlos Cardenas/ANP
His work is sometimes described as a critique of consumerism or modernity in general; He has also been accused of ridiculing the ‘common man’. And no, no one is beautiful in his images: beach bodies are burned red, food is being eaten. But the people here aren’t really ugly. Rather, they are simply human, and his photos are stories from the everyday – and what exactly that story is is up to you.
Perhaps it is because of this combination of sharp observation and empathy that Martin Parr’s everyday photos have quickly become iconic. In England, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, he became something of a chronicler of daily life. He published about a hundred books, became world famous, and eventually became the chairman of the legendary photo agency Magnum Photos between 2013 and 2017.
Exhibition with work by Parr in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, 2003.
Photos Vincent Mentzel
That appointment shows how the photojournalistic world had changed, while Parr continued to do what he always did. When Parr joined the prestigious Magnum in 1994, it was accompanied by controversy. As Parr himself described it: Magnum was about serious photojournalism, photos that wanted nothing less than to change the world. In comparison, Parr was much more of an observer from the sidelines, and the interpretation of his work was “open-ended.”
But when does an image change the world? With his approach, Parr became a photographer who taught his viewers to look more closely at the everyday. Nowhere was this more successful than with the series that would become his breakthrough: The Last Resortthree summers between 1985 and 1987 on the beaches of New Brighton, among the fish and chips and the screaming children. Suddenly the ice cream seller looksa teenage girl with her first makeup, looking at us, irritated and cold. In front of the counter a boy has his ice cream in his hand, rushing between the pushing people waiting; he quickly glances furtively at the ice cream seller’s body.
Parr captured that exact look: not pretty, not critical, but one that thousands of kids at swimming pools know.
An outdoor exhibition in Switzerland with work by Martin Parr.
Photo Peter Klaunzer/ANP
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