Martin Parr – social comment or autopilot?

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Up and Down Peachtree: Photos of Atlanta

By Martin Parr

Martin Parr’s career as a photographer began its amazing ascent at about the time he started shooting pictures in colour, in 1984. Since the advent of digital photography’s relative ease of colour imaging, relative to that of film, Parr’s work has become the exemplar of colour-saturated pictures. Chromatic variety and intensity, in their turn, have become synonymous with images of popular culture: so much so that, more than ever before, black-and-white photographs have assumed an element of chic and elite culture that would have puzzled the likes of American photojournalist Weegee (1895–1968) no end.

This is evident within the select ranks of Magnum photographers to which Parr, age 60, belongs. If you seek elegiac images that underscore the dignity of humankind, look no further than the majestic monochrome works of Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado. If witty critique – and perceptions of Parr’s wittiness fall, I would guess, somewhere between caustic and kindly, depending on your social class – is your cup of tea, then Parr is your PG Tips, tasty and aiming to please.

Parr’s new, general-audience book,Up and Down Peachtree, is drawn from the 2011 exhibition of his work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Along with Kael Alford and Shane Lavalette – two younger photojournalists from the Northeastern United States –Parr was commissioned by the High to participate in its series called ‘Picturing the South’. The book’s is about the size of a glossy, chunky magazine, sans text. Which is to say, there is almost no text at all with the most notable absence being any verbiage identifying any of the subject matter. Pages at the beginning and end feature images cut-and-pasted from photographs displayed elsewhere in the book, and they are floated against backgrounds of uniformly high-keyed hue. The focus is on artifice: no earthy colours here, nothing verging on what used to pass for good taste.

Consistent with his pictures made in Great Britain, Parr’s photographs here focus on snippets of signage, people caught in messy moments (most gratifyingly when those people come from the upper or aspirational classes), and food. While Parr gives his due to such institutions as African-American churches and the legacy of Atlanta-born Ted Turner, food and drink comprise the subject of more than half of the volume’s pictures. 

There are photographs of food as still life, food and drink being ingested and imbibed, food and drink being sold, adverts for food and drink. With the possible exception of a few glasses of wine, most of these comestibles fall into the junk category. No one here is sitting at table. It’s all calories on the fly. True, some of these images pertain to the culture of the American South – Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta and corny dogs (frankfurters mounted lengthwise to a skewer, then coated with cornmeal and deep fried) are a staple of Southern popular cuisine – but Parr dwells on Southern junk food to the point of cliché. Is Parr, who is thin and wiry, venturing an opinion as to why so many Americans are dangerously overweight? At a minimum, between 25% and 30% of the population of the American South is morbidly overweight. Is this any more amusing than the 23% of obese Britishers who often turn up in Parr’s pictures?

I hope this all doesn’t sound like a cheap rant by someone who entirely misses the point of Parr’s photojournalism. If what his pictures tell us is of cultural decline, then I have to concur with the moral outrage his pictures have the potential to incite. If, however, we are to take his images as an indulgent statement that contemporary culture is what it is, without any whiff of opprobrium, then this corpus hardly qualifies as innovative and fresh – and I would have to conclude that Parr is on the photographic equivalent of auto pilot. 

Up and Down Peachtree: Photos of Atlanta  by Martin Parr is published by Rome: Contrasto, 2012. 160 pp.110 colour illus, £25.00. ISBN978-8869653322