Humorist of the everyday: a European traveling show surveys British photographer Martin Parr's work since 1972, in which ordinary people find their pleasures, define their communities and endure what they must

Art in America, March, 2004 by Janet Koplos

Martin Parr relentlessly photographs the everyday. Food stands, spas, middleclass living rooms, flowerbeds, receptions and tourist sites have been among his subjects over the last 30 years. His images do not elevate the mundane to poetry or nobility, yet neither do they critique consumer culture--they just revel in it. On a certain level, Parr's subjects are falseness, bad luck and poor taste, yet he maintains a remarkably nuanced tone and never becomes mean. He seems, rather, to find a great amusement in human foibles, including his own.

A selection of 150 works by Parr (born in 1952 in suburban Surrey, England) make up his first retrospective, which is traveling in Europe through 2005. At Rotterdam's Kunsthal last summer it opened with a room installation called Home Sweet Home (1972-74), complete with floral rug, wallpaper, Liberace LPs and lots of photos of artificial flowers, mostly in plastic frames. It ended with Reading Room, a functional space that was a variation on the museum convention of a nook for scanning exhibition catalogues, seemingly converted into a loser's shrine. There was a wall of photos of the artist at various ages and in different situations, but always alone. We saw him in a Venetian gondola, in a glamorized studio portrait, in a manipulated photo that sets his head on a weightlifter's body. Included in the room were a cheap sofa and coffee table, plus a cabinet containing Moon Landing buttons, souvenir plates, toy TV sets and watches with slogans or images. There was also the requisite table with chained catalogues, here hopelessly entangled and dog-eared. Thus Parr showed himself essentially at one with the subjects of his other photos, having some of the same interests and weaknesses. Throughout, his show provokes a mix of embarrassment, sympathy, misery, revulsion and humor.

Among Parr's earliest series is "Butlin's by the Sea" (1972, with Daniel Meadows), recounting the miscellaneous events of a family resort where he once worked as a staff photographer. (Postcards from Butlin's that Parr collected were on view last spring at his New York gallery, Janet Borden--see review p. 125.) In his own small black-and-white shots, we see a dorky emcee and schoolgirl bathing beauties, a mother helping her child pee along the roadside, a swimming pool that's too crowded for anything but standing. "The North," another black-and-white series from the early '70s, emphasizes a setting that looks colorless, cold and bleak; the pictures are hardly flattering. Yet one perceives a certain resilience in the depicted people.

The mid-'70s series "Beauty Spots," presenting black-and-white images of well-known sites from the Hampton Court Maze to Stonehenge, is a parade of people with their backs turned, or passing by each other without notice. "Prizewinners" (1975) consists of close-up color portraits of jam tarts or shallots in sour, laded hues. "Bad Weather," published in a book of that name in 1982, makes being beleaguered by Mother Nature seem funny. These large black-and whites are identified with various locations. Rain is usually the problem. In Dublin two people with umbrellas rush through a downpour, while a third person makes do with a cardboard box over her head; food is abandoned on picnic tables in an industrial yard in a work labeled Jubilee Street Party, Elland, Yorkshire. In a quintessential Parr scene, titled York, a middle-aged woman is smiling as she walks along a rainy street; a bus coming from behind her is about to soak her with a huge splash from a curbside puddle. Other black-and-white images dating from the late '70s are empathetic portraits of a community--in meetings, at work, at tea, at church, in line.

Probably Parr's most disturbingly poignant series is "The Last Resort" (1983-86). These large color photos present people at leisure in tacky and polluted "pleasure spots," sunbathing under looming construction equipment, dipping their toes in the sea where trash has washed up by the rocks, gathering in a sweaty press at a soiled lunch counter. "The Cost of Living" (published 1989) presents a more middle-class population than the earlier work, at cocktail parties, garden tours, neighborhood coffees, victory parties. In many pictures, the joke is that people look bored or stupefied. In others from this series, Parr has cleverly caught repeated gestures. A guest at a ball, in conversation, repeats the pointing gesture of the cupid in the painting behind her. Two girls waiting at horse trials push their hair out of their faces in the same way, with opposite hands. Several images from the series might be subtitled "unlikely conversations"--including a conservative-looking middle-aged woman standing (perhaps at a bus stop) beside a young woman who wears her hair in a Mohawk; and a staid gray haired white man in sport coat and necktie looking forced while chatting with a younger black man in more casual dress at a garden party, as both simultaneously negotiate a wine glass and a paper plate.