The beguiling work of English photographer Martin Parr is the subject of this brief, but thoroughly enjoyable study which sets out to introduce his extraordinary work, particularly the fierce brilliance of his colour images in the 70s and 80s celebrating the white working class on holiday.
Parr is an inspired combination of seaside-postcard artist Donald McGill and Alan Bennett, with a bit of American street photographer Vivian Maier, and a sliver of Diane Arbus, although the grotesques in which Arbus specialised are not what Parr has in mind. Everyone here is at pains to emphasise that Parr is never cruel or mocking, and, yes, it’s quite true. But as a real artist, Parr naturally has what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in his heart. He knows what makes a brilliant image and the person involved is unlikely to find it flattering. (David Walliams is interviewed here, perhaps because of his TV comedy Little Britain, but Little Britain isn’t precisely the same thing either.)
Parr’s pictures are very funny and often piercingly shrewd and sad. It’s sometimes hard to believe that they existed in real life. In a way they didn’t; Parr created them with his eye for an image, for angle and framing. His hard work and eternal vigilance allows him to grab the split-second moment, and his curatorial and editorial gift for sorting through the material is vitally important. The film shows that part of his skill is just looking like an ordinary bloke, going around in the crowd with his wheeled walking frame (after recent illness), smiling benignly, endlessly taking pictures. That normality is what artist Grayson Perry here insightfully calls his “camo”.
Interestingly, the film also shows Parr repeatedly asking his subjects if he can take their picture (posed portraits that are different from the serendipitously snapped moments) but telling them not to smile, just to present their “normal” face. Maybe it is this unsmiling “normal” face that is going to have that vital tragicomic quality.
• I Am Martin Parr is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 February.
