I had never been up so early in my life. It was 1983 and Martin Parr, the great photographer who died on Saturday, had asked me to write the text for a planned book of his images from the west of Ireland, published the following year as A Fair Day. He was still working on them and I went with him to the Mayflower ballroom in Drumshambo and then on to the horse fair at Maam Cross.
We shared a room in a B&B in Connemara and I will never forget the shock of him dragging me out of bed at half past fecking five. He was a lovely, warm, gentle man but he was not going to be delayed by my tardiness.
I couldn’t understand why we had to be at Maam Cross for six o’clock when there was nobody there. Only gradually did it dawn on me that it was crucial to his strategy that people arriving over the next few hours should find this tall gangling Englishman already there. They would take in his oddness and shove it to the back of their minds. He would be part of the day’s scene – at once very obvious and easily disregarded. For the next ten hours, as he worked relentlessly, getting up close to humans and animals, he had a weird kind of presence, a flagrant unobtrusiveness.
Parr lived in Leitrim between 1980 and 1982. It is important that he came for practical, ordinary reasons – his beloved wife Susie got a job as a speech therapist – and not, like so many outsiders over the previous century, in search of the exotic or the “authentic”. (Parr was always too amused by the innate comedy of the human condition to be a romantic: his previous project, called Bad Weather, is a brilliantly and hilariously downbeat take on the old romantic theme of the struggle of humanity against nature – nature being, in this archipelago, mostly horizontal rain.)
RM Block
[ Acclaimed British photographer Martin Par dies aged 73 Opens in new window ]
Watching him that day was an education in the nature of artistic genius, the hard calibration of inspiration to perspiration that makes for the extraordinary. It was sheer, dogged hard work that made possible the intimacy that marks all his artistry. He laboured very hard to be ignored and by being ignored he caught life in its unselfconscious strangeness, going about the business of being its wonderfully bizarre self.
The images he culled from that and other fair days are indeed extraordinary: stark black-and-white photographs that seem both hyperreal and surreal, both documentary and dreamlike.
And wryly, disconcertingly, funny. There’s one, from Muff fair in Co Cavan in which horses and people are overlooked by the plastic cow on top of an ice-cream van – and, if you look closely enough by posters of the H-Block hunger strikers. There’s one from Belmullet fair in which a woman is seen from behind looking into a window and her shape is paralleled by the rear of a cow who seems to be heading for the door of the same house. The human and animal words seem to fuse into one.
The humour does not disguise the melancholy. Parr’s photographs of early 1980s rural Ireland already capture something profoundly unsettling: the sense of a world being abandoned. Some of his images of new bungalows (he loved glorious edifices like the High Chapparal ranch house outside Westport) showed the previous house still standing behind the new one, as if the present is mocking the past.
Parr captured the intermingling of old and new as well, in his way, as Tom Murphy’s plays did. Like a continuity error in a historical movie, the disposable plastic cup on the bench beside a statue of the Virgin Mary breaks the illusion that we are in a deep, static past. Likewise, the timelessness of the fierce, self-punishing climb up the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick, an ancient ritual with pre-Christian roots, is offset by the plastic bag being carried by the pilgrim.
When they were first displayed in 1984, Parr’s sequence of images of Morris Minors abandoned in Irish fields and yards seemed mostly funny, a brilliantly subversive take on the tradition of Irish landscape painting and photography in which the human presence is erased. They still are, but they also now have a more forlorn air – something is being forsaken. A way of life is being cast off. Time is erasing these vestiges of a more frugal past. The humour has not diminished but the poor old cars, gradually sinking back into nature, have something of the poignancy of the archaeological remains of a lost civilisation. And if they can be abandoned so ruthlessly, what else can be ditched?
When we were finalising A Fair Day I went over to see him in his new home in Wallasey on the Mersey. He was already working on his next project, documenting the declining seaside town of New Brighton for the book and exhibition that would start to make him famous in England, The Last Resort. He showed me some of the images and they were almost as much of a shock as being dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour: they were in garish supersaturated colour. The dark Irish rain had to give way to the summer light of the English seaside. He never really went back to the severe monochrome of those Irish images and it was his glorious use of colour that gave him the extraordinary mass appeal that his genius so thoroughly deserved.
But he did repeatedly come back to Ireland and I was able to work with him again on his wonderful overview of 40 years of work here, From the Pope to A Flat White. Those pictures document the transformation of a country, from the people queuing up to buy tins of Pedigree Chum that may have fallen off the back of a lorry in Dublin’s inner city in 1986 to his sly image of the front of a betting shop in Dublin in 2016, all the arrows pointing towards inward migration: the Tian Du hair salon and the company offering translation services.
The stereotypes of Irishness that Parr plays with so delightfully in his images from the period of his Common Sense project in 1997 – red hair, a priest’s dog collar, corned beef and cabbage – never really went away, of course. Because of tourism and the notion of Ireland as a global brand, clichés have a long radioactive half-life. Parr’s own work in his period moved ever further from any notion of the innocently “candid” shot to explore the increasingly self-conscious ways in which, in the age of the camera phone and social media, people are staging their own public appearances.
He captured that transition – in Ireland and around the world – better than anyone else. He knew he was, more and more, making images of lives and places already saturated in imagery, visualising a planet overloaded with visual stimulae. But even as he did so, he always persevered in his belief that there is humanity in humour and humour in humanity. His infinite curiosity will, in times to come, be infinitely requited.
