recently acknowledged in an interview for the magazine Esquire that “the only good thing about growing up in Surrey [el condado del sudeste de Inglaterra] It was that he made every other place seem interesting.” That’s why he left there early.
But this rejection of one of the regions that best captures the quintessence of the British soul, with its landscapes, its gardens and its historical monuments, was in reality a mischievous and false provocation. Because in that same interview he proclaimed his love “for the madness of the English, with their hobbies and interests. Races, agricultural exhibitions or summer holidays. We are a bunch of eccentrics.”
Parr, who with his color photographs of middle-class beachgoers in English coastal cities or of the upper-class and ‘Thatcherite’ celebrations of the eighties masterfully portrayed the island’s class division, died this Saturday at his home in Bristol, as his family announced with a message on his Instagram account. “It is with great sadness that we announce that Martin Parr (1952-2025) passed away yesterday at his home in Bristol,” the text reads. He had been diagnosed with cancer in May 2021.
Parr was considered one of the most important documentary photographers of the last half century. He was President of the between 2013 and 2017.
His 1986 book The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton assumed a revolution in documentary photography, characterized until then by the romantic use of black and white, which tended to idealize an England that was increasingly distant from that post-war nostalgia. Even the title contained irony and provocation. Resort It is what holiday complexes are called in English. But last resort It also means ‘last resort’. New Brighton beach, on the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, was the last and accessible resort for a lower-middle class hungry for sun and leisure.
“Coastal places are apparently happy places, but they also hide a certain depravity,” explained Parr. Three summers in a row in New Brighton produced fascinating and depressing snapshots, of Englishmen aged and scorched like crabs by the sun; promenades where consumer garbage piles up on the ground; snotty or crying children or avid consumers of fish & chips (fried battered fish and chips), the quintessential dish of the British working class.
Not everyone was able to appreciate Parr’s creative proposal. His intention to put a very real England in front of the mirror was seen by some critics as the haughty and condescending vision of someone belonging to a higher social class. But his work ended up being very popular, and his admirers saw in those photos the daily life and aspirations of many compatriots.
“All photojournalists are left-wing. You don’t dedicate yourself to this job if you don’t care about people and show interest in their well-being. Even if I only try to create entertainment,” Parr said in another interview, this time for the newspaper The Observer.
The publication of his book of summer scenes was followed by another great work, The Cost of Living (The Cost of Living). Parr had by then moved to Bristol with his wife Susan Mitchel, whom he met at Manchester Polytechnic in the late sixties, and their daughter, Ellen. After several years on the west coast of Ireland, arrival in a vibrant, time-bound port city coincided with the start of the Margaret Thatcher era in the UK.
Parr then portrayed the other side of the coin of a society in which, more than in any other European society, the division of social classes was still very present. Parties in sumptuous gardens, events in private schools and compulsive consumerism. The new photographs ended up convincing those most skeptical of the author’s creative purposes.
For many years, Parr escaped to Benidorm to portray a place on the Spanish coast that obsessed him, a place of pilgrimage for many Englishmen who made it their own and contributed an iconography that was half tacky, half eccentric and British to the core, with its succession of reddened skins, inflatable mattresses, alcohol and strident colors.
His incorporation into the Magnum photography agency, the temple of photojournalism, was mired in controversy. His work was attacked by some colleagues, who considered it populist and lacking depth. Philip Jones Griffiths, the Welsh photographer who captured the horrors of the Vietnam War in his snapshots, carried out a virulent campaign against Parr’s entry into the agency. “Someone who has been described as Margaret Thatcher’s favorite photographer cannot belong to Magnum,” he said then.
Parr managed to join after a vote in which he saved his membership by a single vote. Years later, between 2014 and 2017, he became the president of the agency, when the quality and importance of his work was already indisputable.
Like his English compatriots, Parr’s eccentricity led him to be a compulsive collector of the strangest objects possible, such as everything related to Laika, Belka and Strelka, the three astronaut dogs that the Soviet Union put into orbit, or Saddam Hussein’s watch collection. “Photography,” he said, “is also a form of collecting.” His snapshots, which burst into their day like a slap in the face of reality, are today a collection of nostalgia for all those Brexiteers who dream of a disappeared England. Parr was against the United Kingdom leaving the EU, but like many other Britons whom the press dubbed remoaners (a play on words that mixes remain —stay—with moan —moan, sigh—), he never stopped longing for and pursuing the country he loved with his photos.
