Martin Parr Photographic Works 1971 - 2000 *
Martin Parr's photography thrives on capturing the glorious awfulness of a situation, and his best work embodies this "it's so bad, it's good" approach to life. Washed-up, overweight plebs on the beach at New Brighton, all spades and fags and hotdogs? He's there. Swarms of Japanese tourists milling around the Acropolis? Yes please.
The Barbican have given the maverick Magnum member the full retrospective treatment. Sadly, his early work is unremarkable. His black-and-white pictures of working-class life in 1970s Yorkshire evoke Bill Brandt's negotiation of this terrain some 40 years earlier, but aren't yet distinctively Parr-ish. The exception is a series documenting 1970s living rooms and their beaming occupants.
It's only when Parr turns to colour film that he finds his forte. His sorry snaps of 1980s Tupperware parties and Merseyside hairdressers are exquisitely dismal, as are his pictures of the late Eighties fad for booze-fuelled daytrips to Calais.
Signs of the Times is my favourite Parr series: a cruel poke at the aspirational tastes of Bristol suburbanites that never fails to induce a snigger. Photos of ruched gold curtains and floral pouffes are accompanied by captions in which the owners unwittingly get to dig their own graves ("we wanted a cottageystately home kind of feel"). This is Posh and Becks avant la lettre.
It comes as some surprise, then, to find Naomi Klein's No Logo on prominent display in the gallery's lavishly kitsch reading room - a mere stone's throw from Parr's own collection of tiny plastic televisions and M1 cleaning polish. How can his photography possibly be seen as a critique of consumerism? If anything it's a celebration of its worst excesses.
Parr's photography looks so fabulous in books that you have to wonder how much is gained by showing his photographs in an exhibition. The answer, it has to be said, is not much: his garish pictures of British leisure are best explored in a hand-held format, not blown up big on the wall. But for people who only know Parr as the man behind the Boring Postcards, this show is an unbeatable primer to the rest of his output.
