Think of England

Ces photographies prises entre 1995 et 2003, brossent un portrait affectueusement satirique de l'identité de l'Angleterre à travers un parcours allant d'Ascot, des stations balnéaires, des bordures de plantes herbacées ou des ventes de charité, aux sandwiches au concombre, aux tasses de thé ou aux sachets de moutarde anglaise. ©Electre 2026

Martin Parr is a most travelled photographer. Yet, in a real sense, wherever he photographs, he photographs England. This is not to say he is insensitive to other cultures - Parr is no Little Englander in attitude - but that he brings a particularly English sensibility to the world. He has an English eye, at once satirical and affectionate, playful and as sharp as a Savile Row crease. He is renowned as a humorous photographer, but that should not be taken to mean lightweight. The best English humorists wield humour as a weapon. Silly walks and funny voices mask existential angst. We wince at his pictures as much as smile.

Like the best humorists, Martin Parr flirts - sometimes dangerously - with cliché and stereotype to make his point. And his point is usually deadly serious. It pricks. It can draw blood. Think Of England ... the title is a dead giveaway. Parr is describing an England that is in the mind. The England of floral dresses, suburban lawns and seaside sauciness. Every tourist's view of England. Safe, chintzy middle-class or jolly yeoman working-class England with at least one foot in the past. You will look in vain here for grey, wet skies, inner-city problems, genetically modified countryside, or an England which is as ruthlessly commercial or as much of a cultural melting pot as the United States. For Parr's England is a fiction, an idea of England. Perhaps an idea of an idea of England. Martin Parr, a thoroughly contemporary artist, is critiquing representation. It can't possibly be true, can it? It's so colourful for a start. One does not readily associate Day-Glo colours with England, except on chocolate boxes or English Tourist Board posters, but that's part of the point.

Ideas about England emanate from society, are filtered back into society and play their part in shaping society. Ideas, conceptions - and misconceptions - are acted upon. Cliché becomes part of the wider truth, part of the contemporary scene and not just nostalgic irrelevance.

So Martin Parr is subjecting clichés about England to his particular scrutiny, piling one upon another like a veritable Russian doll of clichés so we might have the pleasure of peeling them away. However, let's not forget that he observed these things - every floral dress and pink iced cake - albeit with a surgically selective eye.

Photography is essentially a superficial art in the strict sense: it deals with the surface of things. But in the hands of someone like Martin Parr, so attentive and attuned to the nuances of surface - the aspect of things, the visible face of society - so much more than surface is revealed. Gerry Badger