There is a puzzle about the photography of Martin Parr. Today he is probably the best-known British documentary photographer. This is partly because he collaborated with BBC television on two entertaining series, Signs of the Times (people and their interior decor) and From A to B (people and their cars). He took the stills which became the books of the series. Since 1994, he has also been a member of the world's best-known documentary photo agency, Magnum, the co-operative founded by a legendary quartet of photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour. Yet his candidacy led to a spectacular row.
Philip Jones Griffiths, famous for Vietnam war photography, led the opposition. Parr, he wrote to his fellow-members, "has always shunned the values that Magnum was built on." A historian of Magnum, Russell Miller, notes that Parr was "easily the most controversial" photographer ever admitted to membership. He made it by one vote.
The argument is this. On the one hand, there is the "humanistic" photography pioneered by Magnum's European founders-usually in black and white. Some, like Capa, made their name in battle. For others, notably Cartier-Bresson, the point was to capture the "decisive moment" in the everyday life of ordinary citizens. In war, the tone was angry; in peace it was "concerned," sometimes sentimental. The classic embodiment in Britain was Picture Post magazine, and now many present-day television documentaries.
On the other hand, there is the "new" (or newish) photography. Usually in garish, almost trashy colour, this follows in the muddy footsteps of men like William Eggleston and Robert Frank or women like Lisette Model and Diane Arbus, who characteristically portrayed the underbelly of American life.
Ever since Parr took unflattering pictures of holiday-makers at New Brighton, on the Wirrall coast, for his 1986 collection The Last Resort, (and thereafter went on to unflatter everyone he photographed) his critics have implied that he is somehow not only un-Magnum but even un-English. Yet hardly anyone could be more English than Parr: raised in suburban Surrey; a former trainspotter turned obsessive collector of kitsch; ultra-conscious of social class.
He began in the Cartier-Bresson tradition. Here the puzzle starts. When I first encountered him, he was taking some of his best photographs-in and around a Methodist chapel in a Pennine valley, just down from the site of Wuthering Heights. The congregation was ageing. (March's Pic of the Month, p57, is from this period.) The chapel was later closed and gentrified into a house.
But Parr captured those bony Yorkshire country faces with a loving lens. I met him because my family and I were picnicking beside a nearby stream. A man was hopping down the stones, snapping away. This turned out to be Martin Parr at the start of his career. We were probably candidates for another of his affectionate early projects, Beauty Spots. At his studio, he gave me a print of the picture. I'm glad we weren't out and about in New Brighton.
He photographed a street in Salford, now demolished, with the same amicable eye. Families in their best outfits sit proudly on bright sofas with vacuumed floral carpets. The exhibition includes a replica of a similar room, with a tape from South Pacific endlessly replayed ("I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair...").
But Parr seems to have decided that this was the past and that amicability was outdated. He plunged into chronicling the kind of suburbia he grew up in. The pictures took an ironic, even sour, turn; they seemed to be about him as much as about their supposed subjects. His detractors say the outcome is patronising, intrusive, even cruel. Replying to a fax from Cartier-Bresson, censuring his work, Parr said: "I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it. My intuition tells me these are the issues I must deal with through photography. What I would query with you is 'Why shoot the messenger?'"
The Barbican exhibition (until 14th April) and book deepen the Parr puzzle. He was drawn to photography by his Yorkshire grandfather; hence, perhaps, his kindness to those Yorkshire faces. But even behind the later and apparently harsh pictures of suburbia, of greasy-spoon cafes, of drunken young men on Channel ferries, things are not quite what they seem. I was led to one corner of the exhibition by the sound of laughter. Visitors were sitting in front of a video of Parr, interviewing residents of a Bristol suburb. It was gentle, amusing, even Pooterish. A stills camera can't photograph words.
In one important way, the photographs on the Barbican walls tear his pictures out of context. Before I left, I sat in the reading room that ends the exhibition and leafed through the book- collections from which the photographs came. In between the edgier shots, chosen for the walls (and for the exhibition poster), were many that put these in a friendlier context. The main distinction between Parr's view of photography and Cartier-Bresson's view may be that, for one man, the "decisive moment" had to be encapsulated in a single wonderful shot. Whereas in a world dominated by television idioms, Parr is trying to capture a process: for him, one picture does not tell the story.
