Martin Parr’s Eye for Human Folly
Martin Parr, who died in December, at the age of seventy-three, had a specific paint color in mind for the first room of “Global Warning,” a retrospective of his photographs that’s currently on display at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. The show’s curator, Quentin Bajac, had suggested that they go with something classic—i.e., white—but Parr was very clear that he wanted a more exuberant hue. The one he chose might commonly be called bubblegum, but anyone who’s visited the show may be inclined to think of it forever after as Parr Pink: the pink of a hibiscus on a garishly printed bikini bottom, of bootleg perfume bottles, of diaper packages and cookie icing; the pink of slack mouths and dangling uvulas and nostrils shown so close up that you can see every last busted blood vessel, suggesting a lifetime of excess in a world of overconsumption.
Parr spent his career examining human appetites and the contradictions they engender, but his approach wasn’t always so frontal. One of the strengths of the Jeu de Paume show is that it comprises some hundred and eighty photographs made in the course of fifty years, not just instantly recognizable works such as Parr’s hyper-saturated portraits of oiled-up working-class vacationers at resorts in New Brighton or Benidorm.
In the early nineteen-eighties, for instance, Parr drove around the west coast of Ireland in a Morris Minor, documenting other, abandoned Morris Minors that dotted the landscape. Shot in black-and-white, the resulting photos have an elegiac quality and suggest the eventual mortality of any innovation or craze—ashes to ashes, rack-and-pinion steering to rack-and-pinion steering. They also make the case that Parr had a stronger conceptual bent than he is commonly given credit for: according to the rules he set for himself, anytime he saw a Morris he had to stop and shoot.
Parr went electric in 1983, inspired by John Hinde’s postcard photography and the pungent colors coming out of America in the work of Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. An image from Salford, England—I think it’s his masterpiece—shows a pair of women backed up against the pebble-dash wall of a supermarket, gripping the handles of their stuffed shopping carts. They look like racecar drivers getting ready to do battle on the homestretch. Behold the competition, pride, and preening aggression that Parr detects in our eternal need to prove ourselves through the things we buy!
Food is one of his favorite thunderdomes, and it’s interesting to compare his images of cakes and meats and popsicles to those of someone like the American painter Wayne Thiebaud. The artists share an attraction to the gleaming counters and alluring rows of postwar consumer culture, but Parr holds his gaze longer, seeking the nausea after the binge. At the Jeu de Paume, forty-two photographs from Parr’s “Common Sense” series are hung together in a grid. Wedged in among phallic pastries and slabs of iridescent ham is a portrait of a priest, cropped so tightly that practically all you see is a collar and a chin. Stray threads protrude from his cassock; the fabric looks so cheap you can practically hear it squeaking. It’s unclear whether we’re looking at a holy man or some dude who ordered a Halloween costume on Amazon.
Parr had to fight to get into Magnum, the prestigious photographic coöperative. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the agency, considered Parr’s work cruel and garish, reportedly telling him, “We’re from two different solar systems.” Parr thrust back: “I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it. . . . What I would query with you is, Why shoot the messenger?” Eventually, the men reconciled and Parr became a Magnum man, sneaking in with just enough votes.
Despite his reputation for levity, he was a social photographer in his own way, a photographe de rue who stretched the purview of street photography to the realms of mass tourism and trash culture, where the high-minded humanists of yore deigned not go. A photograph of a towering woman gassing up a zippy little car and wearing a plaid skirt and a T-shirt that reads, incongruously, “I’d Rather Be Truckin’ ” brings to mind a Quentin Blake illustration: Miss Trunchbull for the age of fossil fuels.
Parr’s humor is also detectably British, with a poking quality that only rarely verges into outright peevishness. Some of his japes have dulled with age—a series of tourists wielding selfie sticks doesn’t pack the punch it might have when the technology, and the narcissism that it implied, seemed like a novel development. But works like a postcard-like shot of a postcard rack parked in the middle of a ski path in the Swiss Alps are undiminished in their power to make you laugh while wondering, fondly, what the hell is wrong with people. And his images of royal-kitsch grotesqueries—an abandoned Prince William mask amid the ketchup-and-vodka detritus of a street party celebrating his wedding—seem particularly apt as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to sully the House of Windsor. The Jeu de Paume show has been mobbed, to the point that the museum has added extended hours to accommodate the demand. You have to wonder what Parr would have made of his fans, queuing up in ponchos in the February drizzle. Would he have shot them as pilgrims or as chumps?
What sets Parr’s jokes apart is that they’re not just visual. The conceptual intelligence of his early work—as in, say, a picture showing a grouping of stuffed animals arranged in front of the lace-curtained front window of a modest house in Ireland, rendering it a shadowbox theatre, carried through his œuvre. In one picture from 1995, a tourist in Paris maneuvers for the perfect shot of Notre-Dame’s spire. Parr has photographed him from behind, so that we see the world through his eyes without knowing his identity. All we can make out is his backward-facing baseball cap, reading, “New York Yankees.” It’s a wicked take on the persistence of human folly. Wherever you go, there’s Martin Parr.
