The death of Martin Parr, the photographer whose work chronicled the rituals and customs of British life, was front-page news in France and his life and work were celebrated as far afield as the US and Japan.
If his native England had to shake off concerns about the role of class in Parr’s satirical gaze before it could fully embrace him, countries like France have long revered the Epsom-born artist “like a rock or a movie star”, said the curator Quentin Bajac.
In France, the news of Parr’s death on Saturday aged 73 was marked on the front page of Le Monde and with a 10-minute news bulletin on French public radio.
It was at the Arles photography festival that Parr first came to be appreciated as a serious artist, when his Last Resort series of images of the working-class seaside resort of New Brighton, Merseyside, was featured at the summer event in Provence in 1986; he was invited to curate the festival as guest artistic director in 2004.
“I think Parr felt for a long time he was neglected in England,” said Bajac, the director of the Jeu de Paume arts centre in Paris. “But here it was a real love affair since the 1990s. Nul n’est prophète en son pays, we say in France. ‘No one is a prophet in their own land.’”
The British photographer is best known for pictures that document characteristically English pastimes – holidays in seaside resorts, tea parties, vegetable-growing competitions – but the humorous tone of his work gave him a global appeal.
“Parr was an Englishman through and through,” said Andreas Wellnitz, a German picture editor and visual consultant for the colour supplement of the weekly Die Zeit. “But you could identify with his pictures anywhere in the world.”
“Normal people could find themselves within his photographs because he found beauty in the everyday,” said Wellnitz, who worked on several projects with Parr from 2011 onwards. “His pictures managed to be neither boring nor cynical.”
Germany was one country where, Parr’s influence played out less via galleries than through print. At the award-winning supplement of Die Zeit, Parr’s use of harsh flash and saturated colours proved as influential as those of the lifestyle photographers turned artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Jürgen Teller.
In the US, the British photographer’s eye for the garish and absurd turned out to be a natural match for the gonzo journalism of Vice, the Canadian-American lifestyle magazine.
“Parr’s influence on American photography feels boundless,” said Elizabeth Renstrom, a former photo editor at Vice, pointing to the scrappy, flash-heavy aesthetic that came to define the magazine’s early photographic journalism.
“His saturated colours, brazen closeness, and willingness to let the absurd sit shoulder to shoulder with the sincere offered young American photographers a visual vocabulary that didn’t apologise for being blunt.
“In the Vice universe, this translated into assignments that felt both confrontational and conspiratorial, the kind of imagery that winks at you while documenting something undeniably real,” Renstrom added.
In 2018, the magazine covered the midterm elections not just directly from the campaign trail but from the home of “the original Donald”, Disney World. “Parr showed that humour wasn’t a detour from truth but a way into it.”
In Britain, reservations about his work have centred around the question of how much that humour relies on cliches and stereotypes: working-class Britons with sunburnt backs, middle-class Britons with socks and sandals, fascinators and top hats at Ascot.
Parr himself was critical of the use of cliche in photography – his own and that of others. “I have come to the conclusion that we too are fairly predictable in what we photograph,” he said in a 2010 speech that condemned tropes such as The New Rich, The Bent Lamp-post and The Modern Typology. “We need to consider our subject matter more carefully,” he added.
Curators who worked with Parr outside Britain, however, say his anthropological gaze always went deeper. “He was great at engaging with people,” said Wellnitz. “He wasn’t just interested in capturing cliches but learning about people.”
If photographic projects in the first half of his career were mostly focused on English places and social groups, Parr applied his later lens to locations across the globe, including Hong Kong, the Acropolis in Athens, the Amalfi coast and Machu Picchu. His interest in Asian photographic traditions brought forth two books he compiled and edited, 2004’s The Photobook: A History, Volume 1, which highlighted Japan’s central role in the genre, and 2015’s The Chinese Photobook.
One of his first projects abroad, Japonais Endormis, a 1998 photobook of people who had fallen asleep on the Tokyo metro, fostered a lasting bond with Japan. “There is a huge appreciation for observational photography in Japan, and Martin’s added humour and irony translate well here,” said Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, the directors of the Kyotographie photography festival.
For the 2025 festival, the pair invited Parr to document the impact of overtourism on famous Kyoto sites such as the Kinkaku-ji temple or the city’s cherry blossom spots. Japan’s national public broadcaster NHK followed Parr around for several days. “Martin offered affection and critique without cliche, and his profoundly human gaze on Kyoto will resonate here forever,”Reyboz and Nakanishi said.
If Parr in Britain is remembered as a satirical chronicler of English traditions, his status in countries such as France and Japan has come to be that of a political artist monitoring modernity. Global Warning, a Parr retrospective opening at Jeu de Paume in late January next year, will focus on recurring themes of consumer excess, the prevalence of car culture and our dependence on technology.
“While his work often focused on ‘Englishness’, Japanese audiences often responded more to the humour and satire in his work, and its universal commentaries on human behaviour, consumerism and globalisation,” said Reyboz and Nakanishi.
