Birth of the Parr- esque
artin Parr is so influential today, he’s inspired an adjective: Parr-esque. His unique brand of social satire and wry observation, often focusing on mass culture, British idiosyncrasies and the tourism explosion, is widely emulated. So why has he turned out be such a seminal artist?
Parr was born in 1952, in Surrey, England, the son of a civil servant. While not particularly academic, Parr
Mwas passionate about photography and went to the then-Manchester Polytechnic to study the subject in 1970. During this time, he became very interested in the new wave of documentary and ‘real life’ photographers emerging in the USA – Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and other key influencers featured in the magazine Creative Camera. Parr also admired the work of British photographer Tony Ray Jones. Unlike earlier social documentary photographers in the humanist tradition, Parr was less about changing the world and more about recording its banalities, contradictions and crassness. Parr really found his voice in the 1980s, using his trademark Plaubel Makina camera, wideangle lens and flash to capture detailed, strongly lit images in colour – something quite adventurous for a serious documentary photographer at the time. The new affluence of the Thatcher era proved to be fertile subject matter, along with the dogged survival of the British class system and food as a signifier of social change. The Last Resort (1986) is a classic example, prompting accusations that Parr, who came from a privileged background, was belittling his working-class subjects. Parr aficionados strongly refute such claims, pointing out his equally merciless, Hogarthian depictions of middle and upper-class pretence. The arguments became heated, and Parr managed to scrape into Magnum Photos by one vote. ‘Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade... to places like famine and war,’ he later reflected. ‘I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.’
All this is water under the bridge now, and Parr is very much part of the British art establishment. He isn’t a parochial photographer, though, and travels all over the world, chronicling the rise of mass tourism and social change, or just having fun. He is also an avid collector of photo books and opened an eponymous foundation in his adopted home town of Bristol, with the goal of supporting up and coming photographers. The Parr brand goes from strength to strength.