Life with a cherry on top
Martin Parr's latest work, focusing on the global profusion of luxury lifestyles, is filled with ironies and contradictions. All the better for them, he tells Diane Smyth
© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
Ask anyone abroad who springs to mind when they think of contemporary British photography, and just one name usually suffices. Like it or not, Martin Parr is without doubt our most celebrated and prolific figurehead. And in his home country, it seems, we like it not.
With 50-odd books under his belt and countless exhibitions, including a reported Guinness Book of World Records entry for the most number of simultaneous exhibitions (41 for his Common Sense series), Parr's success has made him wealthy. Yet his latest project, Luxury, takes a typically barbed swipe at the rich. 'I'm full of hypocrisies,' he smiles. 'I enjoy them. I've made a living from the very world I'm critiquing.'
Glib as that may sound, he is more than familiar with the controversy that surrounds his work. As The Times wrote last year, 'In the world of photography, if you want to start an argument, just mention the 55-year-old English photo-documentarist Martin Parr'.
His entry into Magnum Photos famously polarised the agency, but he eventually scraped in by a single vote. Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the agency's four founding members - a dedicated humanist, often cited as the 'father of modern photojournalism' - was vociferously against, disparaging Parr's images as 'scornful' and 'from a completely different planet'. Parr wrote back, saying: '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?'
The problem? Parr's brightly-coloured, sometimes harshly-lit images which, say their detractors, satirise their subjects in a cruel and unforgiving way. 'Some people think I'm just out there to take the mickey, and I'm not going to try to persuade them otherwise because controversy never does you any harm,' says Parr. 'But I don't think that's the case. I'm just showing people as I find them. I like people, I get on well with people, and I think that comes across in the photographs. I think they look ok.'
All photographs of people have an element of exploitation, he argues, and his are no exception. And whatever you make of his approach, Parr is at least even-handed. His 1986 book, Last Resort, took a warts-and-all look at the down-at-heel seaside resort of New Brighton in Merseyside. It made his name, but its unromantic depiction drew the kind of criticism that perplexed observers in less class-obsessed countries, accusing him of a ruthless cynicism that preyed on the less advantaged.
That view prevails in Britain, despite his follow up, The Cost of Living in 1989, a caustic study of the comfortable middle classes. Now he's turned his attention to the uber wealthy, with a new book and exhibition simply titled Luxury. 'I've done everything,' he says. 'Middle, upper and lower class. I think I'm very democratic, very fair.'
Wealth first caught his attention in the 1990s, and a couple of these images (including the picture above) have made it into Luxury. But it wasn't until 2002 that he really started to focus on the subject in earnest, when the financial markets were peaking and economies such as India and China started to emerge as world-leading markets. His interest, he says, was originally triggered by environmental concerns. 'I'm attracted to wealth as a subject, just as other photographers are attracted to poverty as a subject,' he explains. 'One of the issues is that we've all become too wealthy, the West in particular is too wealthy, and as and when all the other emerging economies demand and receive the same things that we take for granted, like a fridge and a car, it's going to be a problem for sustainability.'
The series was first shown last May at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as part of his touring Parrworld show, and the timing was impeccable. The recession was well and truly under way and the project, says Parr, took on an elegiac quality. But he doesn't see it as any kind of epitaph, because he doesn't believe the rich are going anywhere. He's continuing to shoot them in both the developed and the developing world, although work on the project has slowed since he put together Luxury. 'It's not like wealth has evaporated, it's just that wealthy people have got, like, £20m instead of £25m,' he says. 'Or £20bn. And they're less ostentatious and showy.'
Ostentation is a central theme, because Parr isn't so much interested in wealth as in conspicuous consumption and the naked desire to live the lifestyle. It's an important distinction, and one that opens Parr to accusations of snobbery - after all, the supposedly vulgar nouveau riche has always been criticised by those more accustomed to privilege. The Independent's Jonathan Brown has criticised Parr's shots of ordinary people dressed up for the Gosford Races for precisely these reasons, and his photographs of new money in India, Russia and South Africa could be read as similarly ambivalent.
For Parr, it was a question of access - the rich don't open their doors easily, he points out, so he had to go to art fairs, horse races and motor shows to shoot them, because that's where they're off guard, often inebriated and surrounded by photographers. He shot his images all over the world, weaving together photographs from similar scenarios, staged in different countries. You might think that would seem scattergun, but to Parr they're indicative of the globalisation of greed. 'When you look at the images they all seamlessly go into one,' he says. 'There are certain recurring traits like the champagne and the hats. Some subjects look more wealthy than others, some may not be wealthy - it doesn't really matter, the aspiration is the thing.'
These venues also provide apt opportunity to present wealth aspiration as it really is, rather than as it is usually disseminated. The rich are used to being photographed at such events for society pages, where they are presented in an unwaveringly flattering light. 'People see pictures of the wealthy all the time, but those pictures are staged,' he says. 'My work balances the propaganda. I'm equally aware of the language of advertising (which also presents positive pictures of wealth), and I've brought the bright colours of advertising into my work.'
Promiscuity
In fact, Parr doesn't simply appropriate the language of advertising, he's actively engaged in it, shooting documentary-style campaigns such as a recent project for Paul Smith, with whom he's collaborated many times in the past and who has written the forward to his latest book. He's an avid fashion photographer, shooting four or five stories a year for magazines such Citizen K and Jalouse. 'I am very promiscuous,' he told The Times last year. 'I do anything and everything. I like the fact that photography is high and low culture all in one. You can take an advertising shot and sell it as art, and vice versa. Part of my agenda is to exploit my work in every possible way.'
Promiscuous is one word for it; he's also described himself as a workaholic. His output is prodigious, whether he's shooting personal projects, editorial or advertising, or curating and editing other peoples' photographs - he's almost published 'too many' books, he tells me, and he fears losing people's attention because of it. He's got round this by unusual means, publishing some of his books without ISBN numbers, for example, to ensure they can't be sold by Amazon. It helps out independent retailers, he says, and he's candid enough to admit it boosts his market value too. 'It makes the books much more exclusive,' he says. 'It's good because there are people who want to have everything, daft though that may sound.'
Daft it may be, but they're also his market - he's surprisingly cynical, I thought, for a man so critical of consumption. He doesn't see it that way. He started out just wanting to take photographs, he says, but began to actively manage his career when he was accepted into Magnum and the job offers started to roll in. He's also plays down the irony of the context in which he's showing Luxury - alongside his extensive, and no doubt pricey, collection of photographic prints, books and ephemera. 'Thomas Weski (at the Haus der Kunst) wanted to show my collections and suggested he'd like to exhibit one of my projects too,' he says. 'Luxury just made most sense because I'd been putting a lot of work into it.'
And to give him his due, Parr is a tireless promoter of other people's work, particularly that of British photographers. When Parrworld, the biggest exhibition of his work to date, came to the Jeu de Paume in Paris earlier this year, the show was expanded with additional material. It included a show of his Small Worlds project in the nearby Tuileries Gardens, plus prints by Britishphotographers that included well established figures alongside less recognised names, next to an international selection that put pictures by Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand next to those of Rinko Kawauchi and Asako Narahashi.
Tellingly, there's no London venue for the show, although it has just opened at Baltic in Tyneside, it s only UK appearance, which runs until 17 January. His two-volume history of the photobook, co-authored with BJP contributor Gerry Badger, is an important and scholarly contribution to the medium, and there's more to come with a publication featuring Latin American photobooks in 2010.
Next year he's also curating the Brighton Photo Biennial, where he'll take a similar approach to his guest stint at Rencontres d'Arles 2004, taking the opportunity to showcase little-known photographers' work. 'I have this platform and ability to make things happen,' he says. 'I want to use it.'
FURTHER VIEWING
Martin Parr is the keynote speaker at BJP's Vision09 event in London on 27 November. Visit bjp-online.com/vision for further details. Parrworld runs at Baltic in Gateshead until 17 January 2010. Visit balticmill.com. Luxury is published by Chris Boot (ISBN: 978-1-905712-13-7), priced £25. Parr will be signing the book at Vision09. Dewi Lewis has also published The Last Resort (ISBN: 978-1-904587-79-8), priced £30. Visit dewilewispublishing.com. For more of Parr's work visit magnumphotos.com or martinparr.com.
