The many Manchesters of photographer Martin Parr

Martin Parr is a rarity among modern British photographers – he is the author of some remarkable works of social documentary and yet, attending one of his exhibitions, one rarely hears people talking about the formal qualities of that work. Forget about lines and shadow, tone or technique. You are more likely to hear hushed exclamations along the lines of “Oh, Brian, remember when your mother had that exact washing machine” or “that’s just like Auntie Nance’s teapot!” Parr has become a chronicler of the objects of British life and, since becoming a Magnum member (and, for a period until 2017, its president), an international artist’s cooperative co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa among others in 1947, has expanded his remit to capture the peculiarities of material cultures across the globe.

He is, then, more than just a photographer. He’s a filmmaker, collector, and a journalist. He is also a gifted satirist. He’s brave too. Few other photographers would take pictures of food and present them as a collection, as he did with his 2016 book Real Food. Fewer still would then turn their love of kitsch into actual kitsch objects – on sale in the gallery shop was beer branded by the gallery and Parr. He was also one of the first to explore the possibilities of Photoshop, putting himself into a variety of selfies for his book Autoportrait (2000). Parr’s work is grounded in a comic sensibility, borrowing just a little from seaside postcards in his love of brightly lit decadence, decrepitude, and deprivation. Perhaps his most famous single photograph is the sunbather in New Brighton lying in the shadow of a bulldozer.

This new retrospective occupies two large rooms of Manchester’s Art Gallery on Mosley Street and runs until 22nd April. The first room alone makes it well worth the visit. It contains a more-than-generous sample of Parr’s previous interactions with the city where he studied photography at the Polytechnic. It’s always good to go back and explore Parr’s roots. He did similar when he returned to New Brighton last summer, with a show at the Sailing School Gallery, built on the actual spot where he photographed his most celebrated work, The Last Resort, his study of working-class bathers in the 1980s.

If you want the familiar Parr aesthetic, it’s to be found on a wall dominated by huge colour prints, yet the early work is just a compelling and, in the case of his collection of photographs of Prestwich Mental Hospital, they remain some of his best. The same can be said about his ‘Bad Weather’ photographs which take a clever idea (using a waterproof camera in bad weather) to produce distinctive pictures of British life.

The June Street photos captured the lives of people living in a now-demolished terraced street in Salford in the early 1970s. They’re interesting not simply because of the pictures he produced but because Parr subsequently abandoned the approach of posing people inside their lives. Once Parr, in a sense, becomes Parr, he exchanges the formalism of his black and white work with something else. Parr made the change to colour around 1982 and the result was a documentary form where he excelled, working around subjects who are slightly more chaotic and unaware of the camera. The use of flash makes the colours hyper-saturated – even when the subjects look into the camera, in the case of the photograph of a child swinging on a supermarket trolley with the word ‘BUTTER’ dominating the wall behind, you sense that the people have been caught inside their artificial lives.

It is all a welcome reminder that he is better at things than people or, rather, people defined by and through things: a disembodied body carrying shopping bags; a pram outside an off license. Cars. Homes. Possessions. Routines. Shopping trips. Refuelling. Eating. In later series, he would photograph objects in even closer detail, but the methodology is the same, as is the message: we are our things and our things are us.

The second gallery contains the new work, commissioned for this retrospective, and the contrast between the spaces is striking. In many of the new photographs, subjects look straight into the camera. These photographs are much closer to June Street than they are to The Last Resort. They are also, if truth be told, just a little disappointing. They feel like Parr being too much like Parr, doing the Parr-thing for others rather than for himself. The result is closer to a corporate view of the city; a brochure of what makes Manchester special. If feels like Parr has flown in for a few days between other projects in order to say that Manchester does shopping rather well and, to prove that, here are some photographs of shops with their employees smiling conveniently for the camera. We have Media City so here’s a picture of Media City. We do gay nightlife better than anybody so here’s some gay nightlife. We have world-class chemists. He’s a rubber glove holding some test tubes. Football? Here are some fans drinking beer. Multiculturalism? Here’s a mosque. We also have hipsters so here are tattoos and cut-throat shaving…

Your attention might be taken by the photograph of the DJ Mark Radcliffe but, like so many of these pictures, one is left wondering why it’s here. Clearly, Parr was in the studio with a camera in hand. To a degree, therefore, the photograph is staged to show that Manchester makes quality radio. Beyond that, what is its value as a photograph? Is it just meant to record something so that, in 40 years, people might say ‘oh, Mark Radcliffe, I remember my gran listening to him’, thereby reducing his status to that of Auntie Nance’s teapot?

This is not to condemn any of this with faint praise by saying there’s not a bad photograph here but maybe that’s the problem. One of Parr’s great gifts to photography is his mantra – “learn to take lots of bad photographs”. He means by this, don’t stop yourself from taking a photograph because you think it might be bad. You might just be surprised. In this, he’s echoing something often said by the great American photographer, Garry Winogrand, who took photographs to see what things looked like when they were photographed.

Parr, at his best, risks taking bad photographs but also risks producing something brilliant in the moment. The problem is that these photographs convey no risk. He shows us nothing unusual. Modern Manchester is in many ways just a grim as the old and perhaps even crueller. If the photographs are critical of the city, it’s a criticism buried deep in the bland conformity and carefully constructed faux-individualism of the Northern Quarter. One photo of a man urinating at an outside public urinal and another of a man carrying a large inflatable phallus are the closest that Parr comes to tickling the imagination into thinking something is amiss.

The collection, instead, reflects a different Manchester to the city captured in the first room. It takes work by the viewer to sense that, and to see the heartless brutality of gentrification and how corporations have taken over the city; obscuring whatever was or is real with plastic fascia. If you know the city, you can almost follow Parr’s path. He stops in Piccadilly Gardens to photograph people drinking in the open-air café but at no point does he linger around the places where the spice addicts are found. He doesn’t convey the problem the city has with homelessness, the hellish commuter life thanks to Northern Trains, or the inequalities. Never once does he venture down the ginnels hiding the city’s brothels. He doesn’t stray too far into the more desolate areas of the city but it’s unlikely that he was asked to or, indeed, that we would want him to risk his neck for that photo. The result is that he tends to show affluent people doing affluent things. He shows people formalised by a corporate world. The message is that Manchester is great. Come here. Work here. Spend here.

It’s always mean-spirited to say that a photographer did their best work in the teens or their twenties but, with Parr, there’s no risk of that. Though the temptation is to fixate on The Last Resort, The Non-Conformists, or, lesser-known series such as Bad Weather or Prestwich Mental Hospital, his entire career has been spent surprising audiences. He is still capable of surprises but whatever surprise he’s working on at present, this is probably not it. Perhaps it will be another 30 years before we look back and ask “did we really dress like that in Manchester in 2018?” but, really, that’s a poor excuse for photography to exist. Parr is so much better than this but it’s a matter of his sponsors, whoever they are, giving him the time and license to prove it once again.

‘Martin Parr: Return to Manchester’ runs until 22nd April. Admission is free.