Martin Parr is practically a household name in Britain. Over the past 40 years he has published more than 145 books of his photographs and received countless awards and honours, including a CBE in 2021 for his service to photography.
Now in his early 70s, the distinguished documentarian of Ireland and Britain has reached a comfortable though still busy period in his life, splitting his time between Ulster University (he’s a professor at the university’s Belfast School of Art), running the Martin Parr Foundation, in Bristol, and collaborating with several international institutions and galleries on exhibitions of his ever-growing body of work.
The week after our conversation he’s scheduled to visit Japan to oversee a project at Kyotographie, Kyoto’s photo festival. Next year he’ll be in Paris for “a show that will focus on my more political photographs”. Given the strong political undercurrent in Parr’s work since the late 1960s, the effort of distillation required to yield a single exhibition is a fearsome thought. It’s “an interesting challenge”, he says.
Twenty-five of his photographs will be on show in Ireland over the May bank holiday weekend as part of the second Dublin Street Photography Festival. Parr, its guest of honour, has been a regular visitor to Ireland since the late 1970s. That first trip was to accompany his friend Rob Smith, a fellow graduate of Manchester Polytechnic, who had been invited to teach at the National College of Art and Design, in Dublin.
Parr and his girlfriend Susan Mitchell then decided to move to Leitrim, where she worked as a speech and language therapist. “In fact, we initially lived in Rob Smith’s old cottage,” Parr says. In 1978 they decided to get married, anticipating the problems that cohabiting in a religiously conservative country might cause. “Eventually we moved to Boyle, in Roscommon, because that was closer to towns like Manorhamilton, Ballinamore and Mohill – towns with a clinic. Susie visited them on different days.”
More than the ambient religiosity, however, it was the infrastructure that presented a challenge. “We couldn’t get a phone – the wait was about two years. Anyone who wanted to get hold of me would have to call Susie at work, and then in the evening I would go down to the telephone box, put in 75p in shilling bits and call them back. The system was all manual: an operator had to physically plug in the connection.”
Parr’s stint in Ireland was fruitful nevertheless. “It gave me a chance to photograph in the west of Ireland, and I ended up doing a book called A Fair Day.”
That early black-and-white series captures aspects of life in Kerry, Roscommon, Leitrim, Mayo, Galway and Sligo. Parr’s keen lens observes simple but evocative scenes: a competition in hay-bale throwing, pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick, a garda kneeling at an outdoor Mass.
One particularly striking composition of Glenbeigh Races, in Co Kerry, features a group of silhouettes standing on a precipice of shale and loose rock, watching a horse and rider race along Rossbeigh Strand. The onlookers are all men, some bowed with age, others small boys, which lends the photograph an almost mythological quality, as though the human lifespan were rendered tangible in the animal’s mad dash between land and sea.
Parr’s photographs of 1970s Ireland are vivid, piquant and keenly attuned to local life. A Fair Day is also memorable for featuring an early piece by a then relatively unknown Irish writer. “The introduction was written by Fintan O’Toole, who had just started writing for In Dublin at the time ... He wasn’t well-known or in demand the way he is now.”
Parr and his wife left Ireland in 1982, when Susie’s contract ended. In addition to all the other goodbyes that migration forces on you, the photographer’s departure brought a significant professional chapter of his life to a close. “The last big project I did in black-and-white was in Ireland,” he says. “Then, when I moved back to the UK, I switched to colour.”
After returning home Parr completed The Last Resort, a project based in New Brighton, a once-booming seaside town close to where the couple had relocated in Wallasey, across the Mersey from Liverpool. The series not only broke new ground for Parr, employing a rambunctiously loud palette, but also brought him to the attention of the British art community and of the media at large. His Dublin exhibition features some of the photographs – you’ll find them impossible to miss.
Taken between 1983 and 1985, and saturated with colour that’s further amplified by the burst of his camera’s flash, they are an arresting compendium of working-class tourism in Margaret Thatcher’s England. These are holidaymakers in a period of urban decline: families sunbathe beside rusting construction vehicles and piles of litter as older adults people-watch from an ugly concrete promenade.
The series provoked a backlash at the time, especially after it was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “People started saying, ‘What’s this middle-class photographer doing, exploiting the working class?’ The truth is, many people simply didn’t know what the north of England actually looked like,” Parr says. “They didn’t realise how shabby and rundown it was at the time. So they got quite upset – but really on false pretences. That was just the reality of the place.”
The Last Resort encapsulates the style and artistic vision that have made Parr an internationally renowned photographer: highly sensitive to class dynamics yet free from didactic political messaging, his images brim with humour and absurdity while paying strict attention to the realities of commonplace experience.
“I think the leisure pursuits of the western world may be the most defining focus of my work – class being a part of that, especially in the UK, where we’re still a very class-dominated society. Leisure pursuits have always struck me as the most interesting thing to explore.
“I’m not a photojournalist in the sense that I cover wars, famines or floods. That doesn’t particularly interest me. Many others, especially in Magnum Photos, do that kind of work,” he says about the renowned international co-operative that he joined in 1994. “For me it’s the ordinariness of ordinary life. I’m interested in documenting everyday life and finding ways to make something interesting out of it.”
Parr’s commitment to documentary is present in every aspect of his work, especially in the Martin Parr Foundation, which he established in 2017. Its remit is to support British and Irish photographers working in the field. “We exhibit their work and provide a platform for them to showcase it,” he says. “We believe documentary photographers are often underestimated, both in Britain and Ireland. The foundation has a library and a large membership scheme. We’re very active, hosting four exhibitions a year.”
Parr, who has continued to photograph Ireland since he lived here – including its first McDonald’s drive-through, at Nutgrove Shopping Centre in Dublin in the mid-1980s, and Shannon Airport in the mid-1990s – is an eloquent champion of his fellow artists, talking about some of the talented photographers the foundation has worked with, including Siân Davey and Jon Tonks, whose latest project “focuses on sustainable fishing”. He also takes a moment to praise Eamonn Doyle, “Dublin’s most successful street photographer”, whom Parr discovered through Doyle’s self-published photo book i. “I still remember seeing that for the first time. He photographs people in a very different way.”
Who influenced Parr? “There are certain photographers who have had a big impact on me, like Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones. Tony Ray-Jones was very young when he died, but in the late 1960s he produced an extraordinary body of work in England. He had spent time in America, where he absorbed the visual language and rhythm of photography there. When he returned he applied that knowledge to his own work, creating a pioneering collection that was later published as A Day Off.”
Does Parr have any concerns about the future of photography, especially given the growing prevalence of generative AI? “I’m not that bothered,” he says. “I’ve seen people use AI to create copies of my work, and the results are terrible. The AI didn’t understand what was important – they were naff. I guess it will improve, but I still believe the quirks of an individual photographer are the things that count.”
Dublin Street Photography Festival runs from Friday, May 2nd, until Monday, May 4th, at Charlemont Square, Dublin 2. Events include ticketed workshops and photowalks, plus free talks. Martin Parr gives the keynote talk at 7pm on Saturday, May 3rd
