The instant you see a Martin Parr photograph, especially one in colour, you either love it or hate it. Are his renowned photographs of English holidaymakers condescending, exploitative and critical? Or witty, good-natured and humanistic? Lee Shulman’s enormously entertaining documentary naturally makes a persuasive case for the latter, following the perma-smiling Parr around New Brighton, Merseyside – the location for his seminal work, ‘The Last Resort’ – as his ‘candid camera’ continues to capture human nature, red in lipstick-stained tooth and nail-polished claw.
Not everyone is a fan of the mirror Parr has held up to society for the past 50-odd years, and it’s a testament to his divisiveness that when the world-renowned Magnum photography collective considered inviting him to join, half the membership threatened to quit if he was allowed in, the other half if he wasn’t.
His status as one of the great social documentarians has long since been understood, and this documentary provides a persuasive case for it, taking an amiable stroll through his Cartier-Bresson-inspired monochrome period, to his embrace of colour photography – the format of fashion and advertising, not serious art – an artistic choice every bit as ‘scandalous’ as Bob Dylan going electric.
Parr’s work is kinder, cleverer and funnier than anything in Little Britain
Parr is both accessible and elusive, resisting self-analysis and preferring to let the work speak for itself; the closest the film gets to a peek behind Parr’s curtain is his claim that his work is political, if you know where to look. Instead, the film looks to fellow photographers and artists for insight, with Grayson Perry astutely noting that Parr – whose style is as instantly recognisable as Picasso’s – has so completely ‘inveigled his way into our subconscious’ that someone described the Queen’s jubilee celebration as being ‘like Martin Parr day’.
Like its subject and his work, I Am Martin Parr does its job superbly and without fuss, coming in at only just over an hour in length. Still, we probably could have done without celebrity superfan David Walliams waxing lyrical about Parr’s work, which is kinder, cleverer, less condescending and – yes – funnier than anything in Little Britain.
Eschewing what Perry describes as the ‘performative seriousness’ of Parr’s peers, the photographer’s needle-sharp eye captures, celebrates, and arguably critiques Britain’s eccentricities, and the wider world’s consumerist excesses, without exaggerating or exploiting them, and Shulman’s film repays him in kindness.
And if it leaves you wanting more, so much the better, for there is a wonderful body of work to explore.
In UK cinemas Feb 21, 2025.