Saturdays at the Sewage Works

The initials​ are hard to decipher, but whoever he was, the French master at Surbiton County Grammar School in 1966 is probably dead by now. Even if he is alive, he is unlikely to recall his exasperated verdict on the shortcomings of the 14-year-old Martin Parr: ‘utterly lazy and inattentive’. For Parr, the consequences were more far-reaching, and in the short term disastrous: his mother tore up the report in front of him. ‘Perhaps she was so disappointed by my school reports because her father, my grandfather, had been a headmaster,’ he suggests. He has waited more than half a century to serve up his revenge, but it has not gone cold. The French master’s verdict has given him the title for this autobiographical collection of 150 numbered images with accompanying texts, taken down by Wendy Jones as she and Parr ‘talked through his past’. The report itself, carefully taped back together, is number 11. ‘I’ve become very proud of “utterly lazy and inattentive”,’ he explains, somewhat redundantly, adding that his headmaster had written: ‘I wish I could understand his temperamental difficulties.’ ‘If only Mr Earnest Waller could see me now!’

From ‘The Last Resort’ (1983-85)

To the reader it may seem that Mr Waller was doing his best but somewhere in Parr the aggrieved teenager lives on. He is so obviously not lazy or inattentive that it is surprising he still minds. His success comes from exactly the opposite qualities. Precise attention, often to the apparently unremarkable, and an energetic, bordering on relentless, commitment to his work, have given him the career whose brilliance he is keen to emphasise. Some slights, it seems, go too deep for time, success and celebrity to heal. The unfortunate French report is not the only grievance to which Parr returns in the course of this agreeably discursive tour of his life and times, which is also at its best an excursion through postwar Britain taking in some of Abroad, as seen from the British point of view. Woven through it is an essay on the history of photography, from his paternal grandfather’s amateur portraits of the 1950s to the mobile phone and the selfie stick. Not all the images are Parr’s and there are heroes as well as villains.

He was born in 1952 and brought up in suburban Surrey in a neatly nuclear family. His father was a civil servant in the Department of the Environment and had met his mother, a part-time typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my parents.’ On holiday in the Pyrenees in 1962 the differences are not on show, except perhaps in his mother’s sideways glance away from the camera. His father, a keen birdwatcher, has his field glasses round his neck. Martin’s younger sister, Vivien, sits in her brother’s lap. Everyone is squinting; the sun must be in their eyes as his father tenses and leans forward slightly, ready to press the remote shutter release. As with every ordinary family there were on close examination things about them that might seem peculiar to outsiders: the regular Saturday outings to the Hersham Sewage Works – good for birdwatching – or Martin’s own museum in the cellar with its star exhibit, the dead mole his father had found and stuffed with cotton wool (‘You know, why not?’). The mole remained a treasured possession until his girlfriend Susie made it clear that it was her or the mole. He and Susie have been married for 45 years.

It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable. Too often the texture of the past is lost because people don’t bother to describe what is obvious to them and to everyone around them. When he gives talks, Parr notices that his audience engages most keenly when they recognise something from their own lives – the moment that comes to us all one day, in a museum or an exhibition, of ‘we had one like that’ as you see yourself in the rear-view mirror becoming history. Yet what is striking about the first third of the book is how slowly certain things changed. I grew up some years after Parr in much the same places and circumstances, through the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, which passed me and him and our families by, largely unchanged. In the suburbs it was still a postwar world for people of our parents’ generation. Rationing was a recent memory, avocado pears a new phenomenon. Parr’s father looks as if he is wearing his demob suit as he emerges from the cellar, picnic rug in hand. When Parr went through his teenage trainspotting phase, the Surrey commuters were still going to work on steam trains. The new suburbia of hostess trollies and mixer taps, with which Parr later made play, was advancing only slowly.

The pace speeds up through Parr’s recollections. By the final third of the book it is going so fast that two of his more recent images, the annual St George’s Day celebrations in West Bromwich, a carnival of England flags and red and white face painting in 2018, and a Tesla showroom in New York in 2023, have taken on new resonance since the beginning of this year. Observation turns to nostalgia while he works. Chew Stoke: A Year in the Life of an English Village was published in 1992, a project for the Telegraph Magazine. The image he has chosen from it has a vicar at a local function, leaning over a table of wine bottles towards a pink-cheeked woman in a red, white and blue striped frock, who clasps her hands as she beams up at him. The idea was conceived as a revisiting of a book by one of Parr’s photographic heroes, John Hinde. Hinde’s Exmoor Village, published in 1947, was a study of Luccombe, but that had already, in a sense, gone. It now belongs to the National Trust and so, Parr concludes, is ‘completely stuck in the past’. He went to Chew Stoke instead. It had ‘a church, a shop, a post office and a vicar – everything you’d expect in an English village’. Thirty-three years later you’d be lucky to find the last three.

Parr’s suburban childhood was interspersed with summer holidays in Calverley, where he went on his own to stay with his grandfather. ‘It was a lot more fun in Yorkshire than in Surrey.’ The book is dedicated to his ‘very nice, very attentive, very gentle, soothing’ grandfather George, who had taken up photography seriously after retiring from his job as a printer. A fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, he lent Martin a camera and they would go out together to take pictures and then process them in George’s darkroom. He even went so far as to stage photographs. The image entitled ‘Grandfather’ is illustrated by a picture of Martin aged ten with ‘Uncle Wilf’, in fact a cousin of George’s, who has been posed ‘as the grandfather-type figure’ showing the boy how the camera they are both holding works. It looks like a Boyhood of Raleigh moment, the course of a lifetime set as the inspiration is passed from one generation to another, but Parr makes clear that his choice of career was not so straightforward. The decision came in two parts. The first, from 1966, is ‘No. 9: Humour’, embodied in the cover of The Tom Lehrer Song Book. It was the first book that Parr bought, and he loved the ‘brilliant, cutting songs’. Lehrer’s death in July is another moment that has overtaken Parr’s book, but he had stopped writing and performing in the 1970s, giving various reasons for the decision including the fact that ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ Lehrer’s work is sometimes Swiftian in its darkness and Parr emphasises that it was this that inspired him. Humour not photography was his first passion. ‘I studied humour very carefully from a very early age.’ At ten, he was asking to stay up late to watch That Was the Week That Was and listening to Hancock’s Half Hour. This was where he found his point of view on the world. It is with the next image, Albuquerque, New Mexico (1957) by Garry Winogrand, that the moment comes when, aged fourteen, Parr decides to be a photographer, saying to himself: ‘It’s what I will do for the rest of my life, until I drop dead … Don’t ask me why. I just knew it was the right thing.’

He had come across the work of Winogrand through his craft teacher, Phil Reed, the one kindred spirit at Surbiton Grammar, who brought in photographic magazines. The image, in black and white, of a small child and an overturned tricycle on a concrete driveway with a vast backdrop of sky and mountains, is indeed ‘strange and compelling’. Parr finds it both ‘perfect’ and yet ‘still a mystery’. It isn’t funny – the mood borders on menace – but it suggests a narrative and in that combination of observation and implicit storytelling it resembles Parr’s work. If he had good circumstantial reasons to choose photography, it seems he chose it only as his medium. His message is what he saw in the satirists. Tony Hancock ‘was good at pricking the pomposity of the English. That’s something which, in a sense, I do, too.’ It is an interesting admission, a concession to those of his critics who accuse him of making fun of his subjects, exploiting them for comic purpose. Parr denies this, but the question has echoed round his work since his breakthrough show and book, The Last Resort, in 1986, of pictures taken at New Brighton over a period of three years.

The Parrs had moved to the Wirral in 1982, not far from New Brighton, which Parr already knew had ‘great potential’. It was ‘a tradition’ for Merseysiders to go to the beach there, ‘if you could call it a beach. It was shabby, but … it had an ice-cream parlour, an amusement arcade and funfair rides.’ There is an excellent black and white image – one of his best – among the New Brighton shots, a classic landscape composition of foreground, middle ground and horizon. In front to the left, a pair of women sit sidesaddle on a breakwater, headscarves and cardigans against the wind. To the right and behind them, two men in jackets and heavy shoes pace purposefully across the beach, and at the water’s edge a man facing out to sea holds the hand of a toddler in shorts. Along the horizon, like sailing ships, are the cranes of Liverpool docks. The picture is the heart, or the hinge, of the book. Over the page, the next New Brighton image, taken only four years later, in colour, seems to come from a different age. Time and Parr’s career pick up speed together.

The use of colour was one reason The Last Resort was controversial. It was not the medium for serious photography. ‘In the 1940s and 1950s colour was almost heresy … regarded as commercial and trivial.’ Parr attributes this purely to snobbery, though there was also the question of processing, which was easier for a solo photographer to do in black and white than colour, and the fact that although anyone could have a cheap colour camera by the 1960s, the colours were neither true nor stable. Fine art and architectural photography continued to be monochrome well into the 1980s. But there is no doubt that snobbery came into it. The enhanced and cheerful colours of John Hinde’s postcard views, which Parr admires, and the tinted studio portraits of debutantes posing as Roman goddesses by Madame Yevonde, which he doesn’t mention, were good enough reasons for a genre still sensitive about its status as an art form to seek to distance itself.

By the late 1970s, however, Parr noticed serious American photographers were moving into colour and in 1982 he got his 6 x 7 Plaubel Makina. This let him take pictures faster. ‘Then I had the idea to use flash in daylight.’ The first of the Last Resort pictures here, ‘No. 51: Colour and Flash’, is a composition of red, white and blue, showing a family eating chips in a seafront shelter. The white is mostly chip paper from the overflowing litter bin. In ‘No. 52: The Burger Bar in the Lido’, from the same series, a crowd of holidaymakers, mostly women and children, are queuing up or putting relish on their food. Parr is behind the counter where the pump-action bottles of mustard, ketchup and brown sauce stand surrounded by crumbs. Nobody is looking at the camera.

The Last Resort was shown in Liverpool, where the images came as ‘no particular shock’ to local people. When it went to the Serpentine, it was a different story: ‘All hell broke loose.’ Parr was accused of patronising his subjects. His explanation for the controversy is that ‘middle-class people down South didn’t know what the North of England was like,’ which can at most be only partly true and sits oddly with his claim to be a satirist. If Parr is celebrating his subject matter, he is doing it from a distance. ‘No. 57: Opening Night’ shows him and Susie ready to go to the Liverpool show, got up in colourful beach gear – Parr in a straw sombrero and Susie with a brightly patterned lilo and matching beach bag. ‘I always made a big effort to dress appropriately for openings.’ It’s hard not to see something patronising in the ‘effort’ he has made to resemble his subjects.

Parr’s form of observational satire is sometimes compared with Alan Bennett’s, but he is closer to Hogarth. Bennett can be sharp, sharper at times than some of his admirers perhaps notice, but his characters have depth. They are drawn with empathy, a quality that Parr’s images lack. And of course Bennett, like Parr’s comic heroes and unlike Parr himself, creates his characters. Bennett’s monologuing Talking Heads and Hancock’s suburban everyman stuck in East Cheam on a Sunday afternoon are fictions and lovable, if not always likeable, because they are understood. Even Lehrer, the beaming harbinger of apocalypse, is alongside his audience, assuring us that ‘we will all go together when we go.’ Hogarth invented his characters but cast an unrelentingly cold eye on them. His point of view, like Parr’s, is located well outside the picture plane. If, as Parr points out, you find yourself in one of his photographs and you don’t like it, there is nothing you can do. Some of his subjects might feel justifiably aggrieved about his interpretations of them. Is the woman in the background of ‘No.75: An English Village’ really ‘looking daggers’? She is slightly out of focus, and her expression is hard to read. She may be furious, or she may be startled by the photographer, or she may have just remembered she left the oven on. Two men holding glasses of wine at a Tory party event with no discernible expression look ‘very smug’ to Parr. ‘Smug’ is a word he uses a lot. ‘Posh’ is another.

At times his detachment is bewildering. His commentary on a picture taken in Tiananmen Square in 1985 during a trip to China with Jane Bown and Heather Angel as guests of the Chinese Photographers’ Association dwells on the food, the number of Chinese photographers who came to his talk (two thousand), the ‘hints of regeneration’ he noticed in the streets and the fact that these pictures were his last sequence in black and white. There is no mention of the way this particular ordinary moment, pedestrians passing by and a child looking at the camera, was made historic four years later by a massacre.

The next​ pivotal point, ‘The Light Switch Moment’, comes in 1991. It features one of the stills Parr took for Signs of the Times, a series of documentary films made for the BBC by Nicholas Barker. These five sets of interviews with individuals and couples talking about their homes and their taste was ‘very deadpan’ and ‘very provocative and controversial’. Still available to view, it is compelling and painful to watch as the subjects, often sitting in pairs on sofas, talk confidingly in response to questions we mostly don’t hear about their homes, their aspirations and their lives. Sometimes one of the pair smiles fondly at the other’s remarks; sometimes, especially in the programme about mothers and daughters, an expression of hurt or bewilderment passes over their face. Parr’s contribution was to take the interviewees’ portraits, standing and unsmiling, as he prefers his subjects, and some still lifes of their favourite possessions. The light switch he has picked is from the home of a Birmingham couple who love their house and have taken trouble to decorate it in the sort of neo-Tudor taste that has been exasperating the cognoscenti since the 1920s. The double switch has a white plastic frame round it in a pattern of swags and garlands. The remark that goes with it is the wife’s comment that ‘we wanted a cottagey, stately home kind of feel.’ Parr likes the image because ‘the thing around the switch is so naff’ and ‘the idea of trying to make a cottagey stately home is ridiculous.’

The next image from Signs of the Times is a gold ruched bathroom blind that featured in the mothers and daughters episode and gives the mother ‘such pleasure … every day when I sit in the bath’. Her daughter likes it too. Parr finds it ‘wonderfully silly’. Because of the TV programmes and the billboard posters promoting them, Signs of the Times was ‘the highest-profile exhibition’ Parr has had, ‘seen by millions’. The people whose curtains, ornaments and spare bedrooms, not to mention their personal relationships, were displayed on ‘posters all over the Tube’ were not so happy, or only ‘to a certain degree’, as Parr admits. ‘I guess we pushed them into that situation.’ As images become historic they reflect the creator as much as the subject. Signs of the Times leaves a nasty taste.

Although he doesn’t often talk in aesthetic terms, some of Parr’s pictures are simply beautiful. Like John Atkinson Grimshaw, who also found his subjects in the streets of Liverpool, Parr favours the ‘magic hour’, the moment when natural light is fading and artificial light beginning to come on, especially effective when reflected from rainy pavements. ‘The only non-swimmer who had ever bought an underwater camera’ according to the shop where he got it, Parr makes use of one to catch a rainy twilight in Halifax, where a man in a flat cap, hands in pockets, is making his way home. In Rothesay he captures James Carrick’s Modernist Pavilion as the moon rises and the red and orange electric light from the interior sings out against the blue of the water and the white of a streetlight.

He continues to be enthusiastic about the latest technology, especially the iPhone 15, which can see more than the human eye at the magic hour or when the light is low in an interior. Gary Williams Performing at Ronnie Scott’s, taken last year, looks at first like a photo collage with Williams and the other foreground figures blank cut-outs against the crowd. In 2019, Parr published Death by Selfie, a book in the shape of a smartphone. Selfies ‘are what tourists do at tourist locations’ according to Parr, who explains that all his travels are ‘trips’, not holidays, and so he is never a tourist. He sees the selfie as an opportunity to photograph people in front of famous buildings. ‘Previously people were facing the monument or whatever it was, and I only got their backs. Now people have turned around. That’s helped me enormously.’ He sounds almost regretful that selfie-sticks seem to be going out of fashion and wonders why, though in his description of people falling off cliffs and stepping in front of trains, he may have answered his own question. The suburban rebel who swore he’d never do commercial work has put some of his prejudice aside now that he is on the inside. Fashion shoots for Gucci in Cannes, a CBE and a royal garden party all take their place in his memoir, albeit with a tendency still to want it both ways. He thinks his fashion images are in some way ‘a subversion of the whole idea of fashion’, though it is hard to see how, or for that matter why fashion, which loves anything ‘meta’, would mind.