I Am Mar­tin Parr review – a one-sided artist portrait

What a strange lit­tle pro­mo piece this is for the ven­er­at­ed British doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mar­tin Parr. He is an artist who is known for his ele­vat­ed ver­sions of the saucy sea­side snap, usu­al­ly depict­ing work­ing class rev­ellers enjoy­ing junk food and alco­hol which are intend­ed to sym­bol­ise the grotesque dimen­sions of ram­pant con­sumer capitalism. 

Lee Shulman’s film is unin­ter­est­ed in any­one who finds Parr’s work to be offen­sive, deri­sive, cheap, gaudy or oppor­tunis­tic. It lines up a mul­ti­lin­gual pha­lanx of talk­ing heads to sing his prais­es, with the high­ly sub­jec­tive, ​“He’s just so fun­ny!” defence being trot­ted out repeat­ed­ly. And no-one is real­ly able to jus­ti­fy a neg­a­tive reac­tion beyond some flim-flam­my bet-hedg­ing such as, ​“If you don’t like him, I just think you’re wrong.”

There’s a sto­ry about the ques­tion of Parr’s induc­tion into the inter­na­tion­al pho­to­graph­ic coop­er­a­tive, Mag­num – a pres­ti­gious arts body with which his style of on-the-lam colour flash pho­tog­ra­phy vio­lent­ly clash­es. We hear that half the vot­ing mem­bers threat­ened to burn their mem­ber cards if he was allowed in. The oth­er half, mean­while, threat­ened to burn their cards if he wasn’t. Yet that down-the-mid­dle chasm in appre­ci­a­tion is framed as a stuffy con­ser­v­a­tive old guard reject­ing moder­ni­ty and progress, rather than a reflec­tion of the fact that, for every per­son who loves him, there’s anoth­er who real­ly doesn’t.

In the film he comes across as an avun­cu­lar sort of chap, some­one who’s smi­ley and pleas­ant and in no way the chest-puff­ing artiste. His method is to just wan­der around and wait for the stars to align when he’ll then pull out his cam­era and take a few snaps. Some­times he asks his sub­jects if they’ll pose for him, oth­er times he just fires off a few stealthy rounds and trun­dles off with his cachet (he is seen walk­ing with a mobil­i­ty aid in the film).

Obvi­ous­ly every­one is enti­tled to their opin­ions about Parr, but it’s hard not to come away from this film and not see him as some sort of class trai­tor who prizes satire over empa­thy. We see archive footage of him pho­tograph­ing peo­ple with osten­ta­tious jew­ellery, hand­made cloth­ing and ridicu­lous tat­toos, telling his sub­jects how much he loves their style. But you don’t believe it for a minute: it’s all part of Parr’s ruse to swift­ly ingra­ti­ate him­self with his sub­ject until he’s got­ten what he needs. The rela­tion­ship between artist and sub­ject when it comes to Parr is pre­sent­ed as deeply super­fi­cial; at least some­one like Diane Arbus real­ly cre­at­ed some fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions about that rela­tion­ship in her famed por­traits of society’s fringe figures.

While this might read like a Parr skep­tic sound­ing off, it’s more about find­ing the ten­sions, con­tro­ver­sies and prob­lems with his art far more inter­est­ing and valu­able than sim­ply being lob­bied to believe that he’s a nation­al treasure.